"-seeky" is an adjectival prefix referring to the quality of tending to
seek something. It offers a linguistic alternative to the current concept of
addiction.
Currently, we consider a
person who experiences chronic
desire for a
drug, possibly along with physical
withdrawal symptoms and frequent or harmful attempts to obtain the drug, to be an "
addict." The problem with this term is that it's totalizing; the same as calling someone "a
woman" or "a
worker," it obscures other important qualities about them. This ties in with the
PDFA's concept of addiction as a
soul-
destroying,
mind-numbing obsession that makes
normal functioning impossible. It does not, however, fit in with the experience of many real addicts. In
Neal Stephenson's historical novel
Cryptonomicon, the fictional priest Enoch Root describes the concept:
Suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof -- even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to looks for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment... I prefer both of them to "addict," because they are both adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.
(Cryptonomicon, Perennial 2000, p. 373)
This is not to say that many people don't become addicted to drugs in a way that consumes and destroys their lives. However, consider that this may be a result of
social factors as well as the phenomenon of addiction. Anyone who's been addicted to
nicotine and attempted to quit can testify that the physical and ]mental] effects of
withdrawal are very severe, and that they would go to great lengths to obtain
cigarettes. In fact, people who have been addicted to both
nicotine and
heroin claim that the need to
smoke is stronger than the need to
shoot up! The difference is that one urge can be fulfilled by an inexpensive trip to the
convenience store, while the other requires large amounts of
money and a risk of long imprisonment.
The complex
social-
biological-
environmental nature of drug-seeking behavior, along with the value of
people-first language, argues for a term that emphasizes the
partial and
quantitative aspects of addiction. Saying "Bobby is morphine-seeky" instead of "Bobby is an addict" or even "Bobby is addicted" emphasizes the fact that Bobby may be a
mathematician, an
entrepreneur, or a
war hero in addition to craving and seeking morphine.
Lexical note: "-seeky" is adapted from the
German root "suchen," to seek. A morphine-seeky person is described as
morphiumsüchtig. To my knowledge, the English version was first proposed by
Neal Stephenson.