Surveying reactions to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death by heroin, Vaughan Bell notices that “many people find it hard to think of addiction as being anything except either a choice or a loss of free will.” The truth of drug addiction, he says, is not so black-and-white:
You are not forced to inject heroin by your brain or by the drug. You do not become an H-zombie or a mindless smack-taking robot. You remain in control of your actions. But that does not mean that it’s a simple ‘choice’ to do something different, as if it was like choosing one brand of soft drink over another, or like deciding between going to the cinema or staying at home. Addiction has a massive effect on people’s choices but not so much by altering the control of actions but by changing the value and consequences of those actions.
If that’s not clear, try thinking of it like this. You probably have full mechanical control over your speech: you can talk when you want and you can stay silent when you want. Most people would say you have free will to speak or to not speak. But try not speaking for a month and see what the consequences are. Strained relationship? Lost job maybe? Friends who ditch you? You are free to choose your actions but you are not free to choose your outcomes. For heroin addicts, the situation is similar.
Jacob Bacharach, whose brother died of an opiate overdose, is repulsed by pundits blurring the line between Hoffman’s art and his addiction:
I don’t suggest that we turn away from the circumstances of death—the opposite of pornography is a prudish sterility that’s equally awful. But if George Clooney died of prostate cancer, would we take the occasion to make it a reflection on the type of roles he chose?
It is one thing to learn to gaze without flinching at the cause of a man’s death, another entirely to treat his illness as a mere foible of his eccentric genius. Hoffman had a family. They knew, or they did not know, the extent and late stage of his disease, but what consolation is it to them, or to anyone who knew him, for a stranger to offer his sickness as a slick metaphor for his professional artistry, a cheap window-dressing on his soul? An actor’s art is doubtlessly informed by his person and his inner being, and Hoffman doubtlessly drew on his own sense and memory of darkness in performing it, but he was a great actor not because of his addiction, but in spite of it, and he did not die because he was a genius, but because he was a man—all of us have our end, but none of us deserves it.
Previous Dish on Hoffman’s death and heroin here, here, and here.
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