ORIGINAL PAPER Addiction Doesn’t Exist, But it is Bad for You Owen Flanagan Received: 23 August 2016 /Accepted: 19 December 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract There is a debate about the nature of addic- tion, whether it is a result of brain damage, brain dys- function, or normal brain changes that result from habit acquisition, and about whether it is a disease. I argue that the debate about whether addiction is a disease is much ado about nothing, since all parties agree it is Bunquestionably destructive.^ Furthermore, the term ‘addiction’ has disappeared from recent DSM’ s in favor of a spectrum of ‘abuse’ disorders. This may be a good thing indicating more nuance in typing the heteroge- neous phenomena we used to call ‘addiction’. Keywords Addiction . Addict . Deep learning . DSM-5 . Lewis . NIDA . Volkow Parable When I was a boy there were a lot of nervous breakdowns, as well as many retarded and senile people. Now there are none. Nowadays there is a lot of addiction, some say there are epidemics of addiction, and of course where there is addiction, there are addicts, many millions of them. Some- day, it is happening already in scientific circles, there will be no addiction and no addicts. We will speak in different ways about the phenomena. Here I explain how and why the riddle in my title is true, or becoming true: addiction doesn’t exist, but it is bad for you. The Deep Learning Hypothesis Marc Lewis’ s Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease (2015) asks us to look at addiction in a new way, not as a disease, certainly not as a brain disease, but as a form of Bdeep learning.^ According to Lewis, the brain of the addict is doing what it is supposed to do when it learns how to link the object of its desire – the pleasure of alcohol or cocaine or heroin with acquiring it and using it, until the whole habit arc becomes well- honed, efficient, a matter of mastery [1]. Often the habit is honed in situations where the only aim is pleasure [2, 3]. Other times acquisition is fueled by fear, anxiety, and shame engendered by experiences in less than optimal social and economic conditions. Its aim is not pleasure, but dulling misery. Lewis’ s key point is that the brain is not necessarily, indeed not usually, harmed during the process of addictive habit acquisition. It simply becomes expert at executing something it is really good at: want- ing to use, seeking and acquiring the object of desire, using efficiently, and eventually using compulsively. This is deep learning. Deep learning provides a novel hypothesis to explain the familiar fact that addicts typically reach a point where they want to stop, but can’t[4–6]. One familiar hypothesis is that using for a long time causes organic damage to the PFC, which disables it from executing the willpower it possessed prior to the damage caused by the substance in question. Lewis thinks that pruning has been mistaken for damage. The PFC always undergoes pruning during habit acquisition, as it does during nor- mal maturation, and thus it does so in the case of Neuroethics DOI 10.1007/s12152-016-9298-z O. Flanagan (*) Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA e-mail: ojf@duke.edu