Addiction should be treated as a choice, not a disease

to be a choice, because it is rooted in a conscious decision to use a substance for an excessive amount of time, before becoming an unhealthy pattern that the addict cannot refrain from.

Macy Swortwood

Addiction: a pattern of obtaining and consuming the same substance over and over again until it takes over one’s mind and body. The debate over if addiction is a choice or a disease has been ongoing for many years now with no concrete answer. Some people believe addiction is a disease because it takes control of the mind and body, affecting the brain and its functions and often resulting in serious complications. Others believe it

Addiction is purely a choice. It indeed affects a person like a disease, but it all starts from the choice a person makes when they consistently keep using a substance despite knowing they should not. Making the mental decision to reach for that pill bottle when you know you have already had the prescribed amount, to hit the vape again when you have been hitting it consecutively the last few months, to smoke weed right before you go to sleep because you “cannot fall asleep without it” are all choices. Consistent use of a substance can quickly turn into a habit that spirals out of control. Yet addicts still have the choice to get help, and the lack of effort addicts take in the beginning before it becomes a habit is in their own control.

The more someone uses a drug, the higher dosage they need in order to feel it or for it to work in some cases. No one intentionally makes the choice to isolate themselves from their whole family because drugs have taken over their brain. No one intentionally wants to be in physical pain from withdrawal, or potentially harm their body permanently by overdosing. However, these effects of addiction are only made possible by the personal choices addicts make to continue using drugs over long periods of time. Labeling addiction as a disease does not help recovery because it gives patients an excuse to believe their addiction is out of their control.

According to the article “Addiction is a Choice” by Brookdale Premier Addiction Recovery, a program based on providing information on drug and alcohol addiction and getting people the help they need, when patients are convinced their addiction is a disease, therapy often does not work because they believe they cannot do anything about their situation. In reality, addiction is something these patients do have control over. They are aware of their own actions and have the conscious ability to change them.

Framing addiction as a choice can help motivate addicts to change their behavior, instead of convincing them they have a disease they cannot fix. Portraying addiction as a choice is a way, though blunt, to give addicts hope of recovery.

The mental and physical effects of addiction can be categorized as a disease, but the harmful consequences and change addiction makes to a human are still recognizable, even to the addict.

The choice to keep using and create an unhealthy pattern, or to stop and get help, has always been up to them.

ChatGPT: a highly impressive, somewhat alarming new artificial intelligence chatbot that provides its user with a complex, human-like answer to any prompt imaginable. From requests to write intricate Python code to a college-level essay, ChatGPT responds in a dialogue format, as if it were part of a conversation. The software was created by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company led by Sam Altman. It was released to the public on Nov. 30, 2022 and is currently in a trial period, during which anyone can test it out. Just within a week of its launch, ChatGPT had surpassed one million users, according to CNBC.

Without a doubt, ChatGPT is revolutionary. The best AI chatbot to be readily available to the public, ChatGPT has been compared to the advent of the iPhone, and some have speculated that it could upend search engines like Google, according to the New York Times.

However, ChatGPT also raises major concerns about how it could affect writing as a skill, a way of learning and a force in society, not to mention its potential effects on certain industries and the job market. While its use may benefit some fields, it comes with significant drawbacks for education.

English classes are most notably affected by ChatGPT. Students can easily make the software write their essays for them, which complicates take-home essays and homework, potentially rendering these things obsolete. This would completely alter the way English classes operate and could even diminish their importance, considering that AI could write in a matter of seconds what takes students hours or days. For now, ChatGPT opens the flood gate to an entirely new way of cheating, creating an additional obstacle for teachers to grapple with. Yet students who continually cheat with ChatGPT will suffer learningloss and poor grades, if they are not learning the skills necessary to do well on assignments like tests or in-class essays.

Generally, extensive use of ChatGPT could seriously degrade the highlyrelevant skills that writing teaches. Learning to write well is learning to communicate and articulate one’s thoughts well — a skill that is vital to operating in the workforce and in society. Writing is used to train the youth how to research, how to think, how to analyze. In a society already so consumed by extremes and neglectful of nuance, that skill is essential. Additionally, writing trains people to focus. With the constant stimulation from technology, the human attention span has already significantly decreased over the past years, according to a Microsoft study, and ChatGPT could be yet another nail in the coffin for humans’ ability to concentrate.

And the future of writing itself? With ChatGPT paving the way for AI being able to write in a human-like way but in a superhuman amount of time, will the importance of real human writing be lost? If mainstream AI makes it so less people write, then writing could become a sort of sectionalized intelligence, split along the line of who inherently values writing and who does not. The only ones who will actively choose to write will be those who appreciate and enjoy it, resulting in a wider literacy gap in the general public.

These possibilities are frightening. But there is something comforting and important to consider: they have not happened yet. It is easy to catastrophize the situation, to worry that ChatGPT spells out doom for both the humanities and humanity itself. But at this current moment, humans have the ability to control AI and ensure that this software does not completely disrupt lives.

Some form of regulation on ChatGPT would be beneficial. New York City public schools have already decided to ban ChatGPT on their district’s networks and devices, according to CNN. Other schools should take this step, though it will be hard to completely eliminate use of ChatGPT since schools cannot truly control what students do during non-school hours.

Furthermore, GPTZero, an app that determines whether a text was written