What If Addiction Is Actually Good for You? | Dr. Elizabeth Roberts

In this episode of Business Talk, Dr. Elizabeth Roberts, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, challenges everything we think we know about addiction. Drawing on her groundbreaking book In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World, she weaves together deeply personal family narratives, her sister's struggle with alcohol and benzodiazepines, her own fraught relationship with sugar, her mother's hoarding, with rich ethnographic research from working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City. What she discovered there upends the Western assumption that addiction is a personal failing rooted in a lack of control. In communities where extended family households foster constant connection and shared life, dependency is not a disease to be cured but a form of devotion, a binding force that keeps people woven into one another's lives. At the heart of her argument is a radical reframing: the real problem is never the substance or the dependency itself, but whether that dependency connects us to others or isolates us from them. From the impact of NAFTA on soda consumption and public health, to the failures of the drug war, to the surprising wisdom of harm reduction, Dr. Roberts invites us to stop asking how can we leave our addictions behind, and start asking to what shall we be addicted? This podcast is brought to you by Global Management Consultancy. To learn more about our activities, follow us on our social media platforms listed below: 1) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hellomrbhatt/ 2) X: https://x.com/hellomrbhatt Disclaimer: 1. The background music incorporated in this video is the intellectual property of its respective developer and is protected under applicable copyright laws. Notwithstanding that it is a free-to-use version, Business Talk, Global Management Consultancy, and Deepak Bhatt do not own, and expressly do not claim, any rights, title, or interest in or to this music. 2. Dr. Elizabeth Roberts shared key insights from her book, “In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World”, in an engaging episode of the Business Talk podcast. The uploaded video contains copyrighted content, so changing any graphics, music, or on-screen appearance of the author or host is not allowed.