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Addiction in many cases has replaced religion, but addiction is a Janus-faced god. One should be able to laugh at oneself, particularly one’s transgressions. Clearly, the problem with addiction is that it is often far from transgressive, and this is frequently where the comedy comes in, for example with a shopaholic as the epitome of the mass consumer, generated by the capitalist society. To not have an addiction or an obsession today would be truly remarkable, truly transgressive. James Hughes in Altered States highlighted Avital Ronnel’s belief that the addict is the nonrenouncer, unable to mourn or disperse feelings. Hughes also referred to Carl Jung’s belief that all addictions are bad, be they to alcohol, morphine, or philosophical ideas, such as idealism, and to the British poet W. H. Auden, who claimed that all sin is addictive, the terminal point of addiction being damnation. This relationship between constructions of addiction and the religious idea of sin, defined by Auden as something that is irresistible, is underscored in contemporary salvation narratives where the sin of addiction is renounced. Hughes revealed that novelist William Burroughs spoke of heroin as yielding the basic formula of an “evil virus,” a term that today echoes Internet use, with the dominance of metaphors around viruses almost taking on a literal meaning of the machine virus spread by the user/machine. In appendix 1 of the 1986 edition of The Naked Lunch (first published in 1959), taken from the British Journal of Addiction (vol. 53, no. 2), Burroughs made the common point that speaking of an addiction to sweets, tobacco, television, detective stories, crossword puzzles, or even warm weather means the term loses its meaning. He went on to explain that morphine becomes a biological need, like water, so the user may die if he is suddenly deprived; however, the diabetic dies without insulin even though he or she is not an addict. The latter is about gaining a normal metabolism, whereas the former is about a drugged metabolism.
It has been seen that clumping all addictions, like all drugs, together is problematic. Being addicted to shoplifting is hardly the same as having an addiction to heroin, although the former may facilitate the latter, but the theological paradigm still holds true. For Burroughs, opium is profane,