Addiction Is A Choice Not A Disease By Steven Slate: Article Analysis

For this paper I read two articles on the opposing viewpoint of addiction. I believe that addiction is a disease, not a choice. The first article titled “Addiction Is a Choice, Not a Disease.” was written by Steven Slate in 2014. The second article is titled “Addiction is Not a Brain Disease (and it Matters)”, and it was written by Neil Levy in 2013. It is obvious that both these articles are against my viewpoint, and I am going to talk about why.
In the first article, Slate is only introduced as the author. He does not discuss anything about why his information is correct or that the reader can trust him; he has no ethos. The only thing that gives him a little ethos is two research experiments he mentions in his article and his references.

They explained that: yes, being addicted to something shows neurological changes in the brain, but it is normal for the brain to change over time. Slate states, “changes in the brain of a substance user as compared to a non-substance user, this difference is not as novel as they make it out to be. They are showing us routine neuroplastic changes which every healthily functioning person's brain goes through naturally.” This simply means that it is natural and healthy for the brain to change over time. Slate backs this up by talking about an experiment performed on taxi drivers in London. “A team of researchers scanned the brains of London taxi drivers and compared their brains to non-taxi drivers. There was a very noticeable difference, not only between the drivers and non-drivers, but also between the more experienced and less experienced drivers.” So, the more a taxi driver got to know the environment the more changes his brain made to remember all the information it was receiving. This shows that anything can cause changes in neurological brain patterns, and they are not necessarily bad things. The longer that someone abuses drugs or other substances the more their brain is going to change, and that is natural. It would probably be more alarming if someone’s brain did not change after doing anything over an extended period of time. Levy explains a similar experiment in his article as well. Another example, Slate discusses is on the changes in a person’s brain from playing the piano. Brain scans were taken of people before they learned to play the piano, throughout the process of learning the piano, and after they were skilled at playing the piano. The longer someone had played the piano the more their brain had changed. Their brains had simply acquired more knowledge and details about how to play the piano. This helps the arguement that any activity that is repeated more than once is going to have an