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Does anyone 100% consciously choose anything? If you make a decision after drinking a strong cup of coffee, how much of that decision came from the caffeine, and how much came from your “consciousness”?

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you—addiction is a disease of forces and circumstances, for sure—but the level of “free will” present in any choice (or sequence of choices) is a certainly not amenable to a binary classification.



Yes, the degree "free will"/willpower factors into a decision is much more of a spectrum than a binary. I'm just pointing out that drug addiction shifts your decisions away from the free will end of the spectrum.


"Drug addiction" is not a singular problem with a singular solution. Every drug has unique effects, even between different people (two people take the same drug and don't have the same result). It does not serve public health to shoehorn everything into a square hole.




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