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Well the problem is it comes across as sneering at your (presumed) outgroup. For a start is it really lefty beliefs? Our resident Indian Mod-Doctor is not left wing and he thinks you can be cured of being an addict. I am centre-leftish and I think you can't. If you think that the general zeitgeist is that addicts can be cured and it didn't used to be, you can just say that. No need to posit any left/right belief unless that is part of your point and you then flesh it out, otherwise it just comes across as being an unnecessary sideswipe.
Sure, anyone in theory might become an addict, until they try cocaine or whatever they won't know. Someone who is an addict has tried X and then been addicted to X. My observation of relatives (and work in social care in the past), is that the desire for whatever substances they were addicted to never goes away. If it is possible for that desire to permanently to go away then I would agree they are no longer an addict. So the definition is "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to X AND still has that desire." In practice I have never seen someone who lost that desire. However it might be possible for treatment in the future to remove that. I just haven't seen any evidence that current treatment really can. What it usually does is give coping strategies for avoiding relapsing in my experience.
Now there are grey areas here, what is the difference between someone who tries cocaine, likes it but is never addicted, versus someone who tried it, got addicted and then is able to resist that desire to use it again? If both people never use cocaine again is there a difference between them? i would suggest yes, in that if the latter's willpower is eroded (through tragedy, being put on painkillers during a hospital visit etc.) then they can relapse into addiction, while the former is not at risk of that.
I believe that both the respondents and the Deputy Solicitor General are trying to represent beliefs that could be described as "lefty", by virtue of their respective positions.
I wrote:
So, it appears that the general zeitgeist is moving toward the idea that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, and some portion thinks that it didn't used to be that way.
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"? What is the AND doing, besides pointing to past conduct? Should "pedophile" be defined as "someone who has any point engaged in pedophilic conduct AND still has that desire" rather than "has pedophilic desires"? Should "homosexual" be defined as "someone who has at any point engaged in homosexual conduct AND still has that desire"? I honestly can't help but point out that this is feeling suuuuper epicycl-y.
You probably could, simply say someone who has that addictive desire yeah. I was just editing your example definition, to point out, that there was a potential exit, in that I could be wrong so that someone who once was an addict and no longer has that desire I would consider no longer an addict. For addiction you can't generally know if you will be an addict until you have experienced it, whereas a pedophile can (and usually will) have those desires before they ever abuse a child. A pedophile who never abuses a child is still a pedophile, but there is no such thing as a cocaine addict who has never tried cocaine because the experience of what it does to you and how it makes you feel is part of developing the addiction.
My point is the zeitgeist already was that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, I am in my 50's and that is certainly what we were taught about addiction when I was a kid. "Not even once!" Whereas current doctors (like self_made_human) seem to think addicts CAN become not addicted to drugs. So is there some kind of "new science" and does it run the direction you think it does?
My experience would say the opposite, that we USED to believe addicts can't be cured and now we are beginning to believe they can. Which could mean that there never was a really settled zeitgeist in the first place, for things to move on from. And therefore politicians and activists can simply use the version that best supports whatever position they are trying to argue in the moment (or more charitably that whatever belief they have is WHY they are taking the position they are taking).
I don't think that saying is identical with saying that it is impossible for someone who is addicted to drugs to become not addicted to drugs. It's saying that it's easy to become addicted to drugs. It was also the slogan of an anti-meth ad campaign by The Man, the gov't, the squares who are, like, the evil Christian Moral Majority or something. It was quite the meme on the internet. Everybody hip to the drug legalization scene knows that it's much more of a joke phrase than a serious exposition of the science of substance use.
In any event, our own perceptions of the zeitgeist aside, what the prominent counsel for the cause claimed was that people used to believe that people who were addicted to drugs could become not addicted to drugs, but that science knows better now. I've primarily just observed that claim.
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