Masks and Persons

Commentary on Louis Charland's Consent and Capacity in the Age of the Opioid Epidemic: The Drug Dealer's Point of View. Charland frames the moral standing of addicted subjects as a conundrum: they are at once capable of making choices and unable to take the best decision for themselves. This paper argues that the conundrum dissolves once addiction is read through its Latin root. The addictus was not any slave, but a free citizen reduced to servitude for an unpaid debt; and in Rome the slave was defined less by lost liberty than by lost public identity, a persona — literally a mask — which Greeks called prosopon. Addicts are unreliable because they too are stripped of their social masks, narrowed to a single character. Their decision-making is impaired not by lack of autonomy but by a shrunken existential horizon, and by the debt they refuse: the one every human owes to desire, and so to life.