Interview 78: Marc Lewis on why addiction is not a disease

Our guest today is Dr Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist and currently a professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. For many years his work centred on dynamic systems approaches to understanding the development of emotions and personality but recently he has perhaps become most well known for his account of his own personal experience of drug addiction Memoirs of Addicted Brain and merging that with the neuroscience of addiction. In his latest book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease he argues that seeing addiction as a disease is not only incorrect but also harmful and this will be the topic of our discussion today