In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World with Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Princeton UP, 2026)In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World with Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Princeton UP, 2026)
New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong. In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World (Princeton UP, 2026) shares the unexpected journey that led Dr. Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Dr. Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency. Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.\ This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
38:44•26 Oct 2026
Rethinking Addiction: Dependency, Connection and the "Inner Yankee"
Episode Overview
- Addiction in US culture is strongly tied to ideals of individual independence and fear of dependency, which Roberts captures in the figure of the "inner Yankee".
- In the Mexico City neighbourhoods Roberts studied, addiction is praised when it connects people, while "vice" is condemned when it isolates them.
- Sugary drinks and lead-glazed dishes are seen by many residents as vital to social connection, even when they carry serious health risks.
- Ecologies of shame and exclusion around addicted people can intensify violence and harm, whereas acceptance and continued connection may reduce isolation and overdose risk.
- Questioning the assumption that dependency is inherently bad opens space to rethink prescribing practices, family responses and large-scale policies such as the drug war.
“"Addiction is any kind of compulsive dependency that connects you with other people... and it is something to be praised."”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety when the very word “addiction” is turned on its head? This conversation on *New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery* brings together anthropology, family story, and big cultural questions in a way that’ll get anyone in recovery, or working with it, thinking hard. Host Dr. Miranda Melcher chats with medical anthropologist Dr. Elizabeth F. S.
Roberts about her book *In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World*. Roberts starts from raw personal ground – her sister’s alcoholism, her mother’s hoarding, her own binge eating – and then contrasts that pain with what she saw living in working-class neighbourhoods in Mexico City. There, neighbours openly claimed their “addictions” to lead-glazed dishes, sugary drinks and even plastic ponies, not as shameful flaws but as bonds that hold people together.
As Roberts explains, for her neighbours, “addiction is any kind of compulsive dependency that connects you with other people,” while “vice” is what pulls you away and isolates you. Dependency itself isn’t the villain. The episode walks through the surprising history of the word “addiction” in English, from “overwhelming devotion” to God or country, to today’s heavily medicalised and moralised label.
Roberts introduces her idea of the “inner Yankee” – that Puritan-style voice in many Americans’ heads policing any hint of excess – and asks what that does to families, health systems and drug policy. You’ll hear sharp contrasts between US recovery culture and Mexican ideas of health as being *more* connected, even if that means accepting risks like diabetes from constant soda. The conversation also touches on violence, the drug war and the damage caused by ecologies of shame.
If your recovery path has ever been tangled up with guilt about “dependency”, this episode might nudge you to ask: what if some of those ties are exactly what keep you alive?
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