“Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong” is a TED Talk by Johann Hari, and is very powerful. You can view it yourself here.

Essentially, the main idea or the thesis of the speech is that addiction is a result of not having anything in your life to make you feel happy, especially not having meaningful connections with friends and family. As such, the way we treat addiction is wrong. In most of the developed world, addicts are stigmatized. They are punished by the system, abandoned by friends and family, and sometimes even publicly humiliated. Society does everything possible to make them feel worse, which is the root of the problem. Instead, Hari suggests that we should reform our “war on drugs” and treat addicts like people who have a health issue, and try to focus on connecting with them. All of this is summed up in the last lines of the TED talk. Hari states, “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection”. This really flipped the way I view addiction.

In the beginning, he talks about how if he were to give everyone in the room heroin for the next 20 days, they would not all necessarily become heroin addicts. Because a lot of them are happy enough with other things in their lives, that they don’t need something like heroin to fill the void. This is similar to why when your grandmother gets a hip replacement and is given morphine, she doesn’t come out a junkie. I also learned that in Portugal, to combat a population with a serious heroin addiction, the government started to give incentives to businesses to hire them, such as paying half their salary. Because those people had something to live for, their lives began to change and addiction decreased in the country.

Johann Hari was a very powerful speaker. His topic was meaningful, and he also had a strong connection to the topic because addiction was a problem in his family. He spreads a positive message, that even though it can be hard, we need to spread a message of love to the addicts in our lives. The difference between delivering a speech and giving a presentation demonstrated here is that a speech is emotional and raw and there’s a lot of passion behind it, while a presentation would be more dry and factual. That’s not to say there are no facts in Hari’s speech, it is loaded with them. However, the way they are delivered is meaningful and persuasive and really flips what you think you know about addiction on its head. Because of this, Hari is definitely delivering a speech, not just giving a presentation. I feel this is a TED Talk we should all be exposed to.