What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

Cover image of What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine: A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard (2026) | Princeton University Press

Reader, I do not know who you are. In particular, I do not know whether you use drugs, whether you are addicted to drugs, or whether, in addition to being addicted to drugs, you identify as an addict. If you do identify as an addict, I hope to speak to some of what that identity means to you, albeit in general, not personal, terms. If you don’t, I ask you to begin by trying to imagine that you do. 

Choose whatever drug makes this imaginative endeavor easiest. Alcohol, benzodiazepines, cannabis, cocaine, crack, heroin, ketamine, kratom, MDMA, oxycontin, Quaaludes, speed. Or imagine being a polydrug user: You take just about anything. Choose whatever context makes this imaginative endeavor easiest. Picture yourself using in restaurants, pubs, clubs, festivals, parties, your home, your friend’s home, the beach, the streets. Draw on whatever experience you may have, with drugs or with people who are addicted to drugs, to get an image of yourself as a person who lives as an addict and identifies as such clearly in mind. Got it? You must imagine how drug use structures your life. Your daily routines will revolve around getting and using drugs. Probably many if not most of the people you spend time with use drugs. Perhaps you live in a community of people who use drugs together. Outside of that community, you may have to work to hide your drug use—whether from family, friends, colleagues, or even the police. Indeed, to sustain your identity, you may even hide some aspects of your drug use from yourself—some of what it has cost you. But, to really imagine what it would be like to identify as an addict, you must imagine that drug use is one of the defining features of your life and a significant part of what defines you. That is what it is to identify as an addict.

Addiction is characterised by a puzzle. To put it intuitively: Why do people use drugs self-destructively? To put it more precisely: Why would anyone persist in using drugs despite evident and severe costs that mean doing so is profoundly against their own good? For some people, identifying as an addict is part of the solution to the puzzle. But to understand this solution, we must recognize that, as with any identity, an addict identity can be a source of value. Be honest, if you are not a reader who already identifies as an addict, did you struggle to imagine what it would really and truly be like to do so? For people who do identify as addicts, the opposite may be the case. They may struggle to imagine what it would really and truly be like for them not to identify as an addict. This imaginative obstacle has practical bite. If you can’t see yourself on the other side of the road from addiction to recovery, then crossing over to a life that is free of addiction represents an existential threat. If you’re not an addict, then who would you be? 

A note about language before proceeding any further: For the purposes of this discussion, I use the term “addict” as opposed to speaking of people with addiction. Many people view the term as stigmatizing and essentializing, and no doubt it is often used in a derogatory fashion. But, for better or for worse, it is the term used by many addicts about themselves, and the effect of this self-identification is precisely the theme to be explored. I therefore use it freely, as part of the project of entering this first-person psychological perspective, but I ask you to read it as it is intended: to capture a self-identification, not to stigmatize or moralize. 

How then does an addict identity explain why a person would persist in using drugs despite evident and severe costs and against their own good? The way to approach this question is backward: by looking first at the role that an ex-addict identity plays in recovery.

In his classic book Theory of Addiction, the psychologist Robert West—an expert on smoking and smoking cessation—tells of an informal study that he conducted. West asked a group of chronic smokers who had quit that very week whether they identified as smokers or as ex-smokers. Half said they identified as ex-smokers. This is extremely optimistic, to put it mildly. As West notes, smoking cessation rates are notoriously poor: Relapse rates are approximately 75 percent within a year. In addition, the subjects themselves, as individuals, had smoked for years if not decades. Induction therefore strongly predicts that, in their own case, they will continue to do so. But at a six-month follow-up, West found that half of the people who had identified as ex-smokers in that first week were not smoking: 50 percent were abstinent. By comparison, every single person who had identified as a smoker in that first week was smoking again: 0 percent were abstinent. Unless the individuals who had identified as ex-smokers somehow “knew” they would remain abstinent—against the odds and induction alike, and by contrast with the individuals who identified as smokers—the intriguing hypothesis to emerge from this study is that the act of identification as an ex-addict dramatically increases the chance of successfully becoming one. 

Subsequent large-scale studies by West and his colleagues support this idea. Nonaddict identities are associated with ongoing abstinence. They also decrease the tendency to substitute alternative unhealthy behaviors and they increase a sense of self-efficacy. Alongside these results, new theories have emerged that posit an ex-addict identity as a crucial mechanism for the transition from active use to stable abstinence, such as the Social Identity Model of Cessation Maintenance and the Social Identity Model of Recovery. Although these interwoven research projects are preliminary, the instinct behind West’s informal study appears to be sound: An ex-addict identity promotes cessation and abstinence alike. But why?

A plausible answer to this question draws on the combination of Self-Categorization Theory and Social Identity Theory—a theoretical framework developed by the social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner. Think of social kinds as ways of categorizing individuals according to socially meaningful properties, such as sex, gender, race, religion, nationality, family role, profession, political affiliation, recreational interest—and more. Although the reality of some social kinds is debated, and the exact criteria for membership of some social kinds is contested, what matters for Self-Categorization Theory and Social Identity Theory is that social kinds in general are associated with specific sets of beliefs, desires, emotions, values, and ways of behaving, to which members are expected to conform simply in virtue of their membership. These expectations embody what we can think of as group-specific norms. To provide just a few examples: Boys don’t cry. Muslims pray five times a day. Mothers love their children. Doctors care for their patients. Conservatives don’t believe in big government. Sports enthusiasts spend a lot of time following sports. 

Group-specific norms may or may not be part of the criteria for membership of a social kind. They can change over time and are rarely (if ever) written in stone. They admit of exceptions. And they often embody stereotypes and warrant social critique. Nonetheless, they are highly informative. When we identify an individual as a member of a social kind, for better or for worse, we expect them to conform to its group-specific norms: to share the beliefs, desires, emotions and values of the group and to behave like members of the group do. These expectations are not merely descriptive. They are not based simply on what the majority of group members are in fact like. Rather, they embody normative standards. Group-specific norms prescribe what group members are supposed to be like. For this reason, if a person identifies as a member of a social kind, they are likely to both explicitly and implicitly self-regulate to ensure their beliefs, desires, emotions, values and ways of behaving conform to the norms of the group. Conformity functions to ensure individuals are viewed as good (enough) members of the social kind, thereby protecting them from the possibility of failing to be identified by third parties as members of the group or being rejected by the group. Crucially, fear of failed social identification and group rejection will be especially strong if group membership is an important source of value for the individual.

Self-Categorization Theory and Social Identity Theory therefore offer an elegant framework for understanding why an ex-addict identity promotes cessation and abstinence. The group-specific norms associated with these identities involve beliefs, desires, emotions, values, and ways of behaving that coalesce around a commitment to not using drugs. In so far as these identities are an important source of value, individuals will be fearful of identity loss and group rejection, and so motivated to abide by the norms of the group. If you value an ex-addict identity, you want to maintain it. If you want to maintain it, you must not use drugs. 

The success of Self-Categorization Theory and Social Identity Theory in explaining the power of an ex-addict identity to recovery has a flip side: Might an addict identity possess a comparable explanatory power in relation to addiction? In other words, perhaps addicts persist in using drugs against their own good because they identify as addicts and these identities are an important source of value, thereby motivating them to abide by the norms of drug use associated with addiction. For, after all, this is precisely what addicts are supposed to do. They are supposed to use drugs, self-destructively.

Excerpted from What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine: A Philosophy of Addiction © 2026 by Hanna Pickard. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.