American Society of Addiciton Medicine
Aug 9, 2021 Reporting from Rockville, MD
Editorial Comment 1/26/2021: Sonnet 119
https://www.asam.org/news/detail/2021/08/09/editorial-comment-1-26-2021-sonnet-119
Aug 9, 2021
For 26 January 2021, William Shakespeare’s 119th Sonnet is provided here. It is a meditation on obsession, describing an unfulfillable expectation of an alchemical conversion: the transmutation of evil thoughts and behaviors. You may take issue; but I believe it to be a poem about addiction. Being printed in the New York Times at least makes an article susceptible to commentary and criticism by the readership, even while not strictly meeting peer review standards. A discussion of drug usage by psychology professor Carl Hart is reviewed in the New York Times at this link, and is largely self-referential: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/books/review/drug-use-for-grown-ups-carl-l-hart.html Focusing principally on heroin use, Hart makes a case for mood-altering drugs as useful, pleasurable, and generally safe over time providing “…a gradual rejection of the overly simplistic idea that drugs are inherently evil, the destroyers of people and neighborhoods.” - Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM

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American Society of Addictin Medicine

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Editorial Comment 1/26/2021: Sonnet 119

Aug 9, 2021

For 26 January 2021,  William Shakespeare’s 119th Sonnet is provided here.  It is a meditation on obsession, describing an unfulfillable expectation of an alchemical conversion: the transmutation of evil thoughts and behaviors.  You may take issue; but I believe it to be a poem about addiction.

Sonnet CXIX

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
   So I return rebuked to my content,
   And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

- Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM