Addiction and Responsibility
The subject of addiction has attracted increasing interest over the past decade from moral philosophers (Watson,1999; Wallace, 1999), legal theorists (Corrado, 2000a, 2000b; Morse, 1999), and, most intriguingly, from economists (Becker, 1992; Becker and Murphy, 1988) and other social scientists (Elster, 1999a, 1999b; Elster and Skog, 1999). Among the factors that explain this escalating intellectual interest in addiction are the crack epidemic beginning in the mid-1980s (which triggered the latest drug war); the surgeon general's 1988 report on nicotine addiction; advances in the science of addiction, especially in neuroscience; tobacco litigation predicated on the addictiveness of nicotine; and continuing public debate on the premises of the nation's policies toward users of illicit drugs.