The Addicted Defendant: Liability and Blame

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A work to show how criminal law engages with substance addiction, expose the contradictory approach, highlighting the subsequent risks and proposing avenues for reform. The law presently contradicts itself. Intoxication rules suggest thatmere intoxication and addicted intoxication are synonymous. Commentary in Law Commission reports indicate that addiction can never lead to involuntary intoxication. Yet certain capacity related offences suggest that addiction canresult in compulsive ingestion of an intoxicant. These contrasting accounts come with different implicit philosophical groundings which speak to the nature of addiction. Moreover, the contradictions mean there is a serious risk ofdefendants becoming unfairly incarcerated or defendants unfairly walking free, as both conclusions cannot be medically nor philosophically sound. This interdisciplinary, desk-based research seeks to show the neuroscience of addiction,followed by the philosophical interpretations which have met it. It is original in translating the medical and philosophical debates into the context of criminal law. Much has been written on addiction, but there has been no application of thesedebates to the present regulations. This is a matter of significance as the present contradictory framework raises serious questions about an equitable application of the state's strongest sanction.