“Just Say No”: Eden Robinson and Gabor Maté on Moral Luck and Addiction

Dr. Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and Eden Robinson’s short story “Contact Sports” and subsequent novel Blood Sports can be read as critiques of the War on Drugs and its slogan, Just Say No. This essay examines how Maté’s and Robinson’s discussions of addiction and drug culture in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside reflect Bernard Williams’s and Thomas Nagel’s conception of moral luck.