Praxis and addiction: a reply to Galliher

Galliher suggests my paper is guilty of four failings: (1) it is an "attack" on Alfred Lindesmith that is ideologically consistent with those mounted by Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, (2) it misleadingly casts the "intimate relationship between physical reactions and human learning [in Lindesmith's theory of addiction] as a [mindbody] dualism," (3) it ignores the "variable impact of drugs on the human actor depending on the cultural and symbolic context," and (4) it erroneously asserts that Lindesmith's commitment to the Blumerian position that "humans are . .. free from psychological determinism" is theoretically irreconcilable with Lindesmith's policy position that addicts' actions and interpretations are beyond their control. Let me rebut each of these claims in turn. Harry Anslinger was an early and active proponent of a federal war on drugs, and his attacks on Lindesmith were based on his commitment to prosecuting drug users as criminals rather than providing addicts with therapy. My article does not even vaguely imply an endorsement of this policy or the federal war on drugs. As did Lindesmith in his day, I abhor the prosecutorial frenzy embodied in the war on drugs and its transparently repressive, racist, and classist consequences. I favor socially sensitive modalities over strictly medical modalities of addiction treatment and feel that a praxiological understanding of human learning offers sounder theoretical grounding for such modalities than does Lindesmith's exclusively symbolic understanding of human learning. No doubt, Lindesmith's theory of addiction was a watershed achievement in American sociology. By demonstrating the centrality of meaning and social learning to the addiction process, Lindesmith took enormous theoretical strides beyond the biologically and psychologically reductionist theories that had hitherto held the day. Unfortunately, however, Lindesmith's Blumerian social psychology prevented his making conceptually rigorous sociological contributions to our understanding of the visceral, or prereflective and nonsyvmnlbolic, features of drug use, druginduced experience, and addiction. Galliher acknowledges that Lindesmith's theory of addiction posits an "intimate relationship between physical reactions and human learning," but, oddly enough, he rejects my assertion that Lindesmith's presumption of such a "relationship" logically requires a categorical distinction between brute physical reactions and human learning processes. To argue that Lindesmith never explicitly endorsed a mind-body dualism in the abstract is irrelevant. Lindesmith's theory of addiction is logically incoherent unless one accepts the view that human experience consists in two categorically distinct forms of perceptionbodily perception and mental perception. According to this view, bodily perception consists in brute sensations that arise as unmediated outcomes of physical stimuli and are pristinely immune to social influence. Conversely, mental perception consists in the voluntary projection of linguistic categories onto brute sensations and is the sole medium for the meaning, social learning, and practical relevance we find in human experience. This is