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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Hanna Pickard, "What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Description: Dr. Hanna Pickard has written a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction.Â
Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? Why don’t they quit out of self-concern? Why does the rat in the experiment, alone in a cage, press the lever again and again for cocaine—to the point of death? In this pathbreaking book What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction (Princeton UP, 2026), Johns Hopkins University professor Pickard proposes a new paradigm for understanding the puzzle of addiction. For too long, our thinking has been hostage to a false d...