Wear the Scarf, Take a Hit in Dopamine Alley

Moral branding, dopamine politics, and the end of argument. No paywall.

“I was never addicted to just one thing. I was addicted to the state.”

— William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was not speaking metaphorically. He was one of the most famous American writers of the mid-twentieth century, the author of Naked Lunch (published in 1959), and a man who spent much of his adult life addicted to heroin and other drugs. He wrote about addiction without romance, without redemption arcs, and without the consolations of recovery culture. He wrote as someone who understood exactly what the needle did—and why it worked.

What Burroughs grasped, from the inside, was that addiction is not fundamentally about substances. It is about the state they induce.

It was about control. About the mind reorganising itself around the pursuit of a stable internal condition. Heroin was not merely a pleasure; it was a technology. It delivered relief from doubt, insulation from chaos, and a brutal clarity of focus. It narrowed the world until it could be managed. It silenced ambiguit…