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There is some confusion, even among experts, about how to define “addiction” and what can be included in that category. A certain breed of purist would say it’s only addiction if drugs are involved. But, the dopamine boosts you get from a slot machine’s intermittent pay-off schedule could also be considered a drug effect: many popular substances work by artificially setting off or potentiating the happy juice you already make in your brain. So the border is blurry at best.

Some also limit the use of the term “addiction” to situations where physical dependence is involved; when the body’s chemistry has changed in response to the use of a drug so that refusing the call to indulge results in strongly noticeable withdrawal symptoms. But withdrawal because of physical dependence is really just a small part of what drives the human animal. My own personal definition of addiction stretches to include virtually any situation in which an individual can’t stop doing something when they really want to stop.

What do I mean when I say that a person can’t stop? This is part of where the slippery free will issue comes in. I never watched any of the Saw horror movies, because I take a lot of drugs and that sort of thing always rebounds on me in the worst way. But let’s just imagine that I somehow got hold of like a hundred junkies and rigged a bomb on each one of them so that if he or she ever touched heroin again it would go off, okay? I know I know, that’s terrible and it wouldn’t work and obviously I’d never do that in real life, but play along with this as an illustration. If you prefer, let’s say the bombs are fake but the junkies don’t know that. Whatever. My thesis is that a few of the poor devils would eventually hit a spoke on their cycle where they caved in and shot up anyway. That’s the percentage who really can’t help it. There are those who really can’t stop. But I bet that quite a few of them would find a way to resist, even though they are clinically addicted.