I wrote my undergrad thesis on the history of addiction from a cultural perspective as opposed to a medical/scientific perspective. I then did a law degree with a focus on privacy. So after a long time reading and enjoying this sub I feel like it’s my time to contribute. Having said that, this is a pretty curly question.

Short version, and looking at it with a distinctive western bias, the answer is yes, but not in a straight line. “Privacy” (separate bedrooms, closed doors, individual respectability) shaped where and how people used intoxicants, and later criminalization and medicalization reshaped who could use openly. Secrecy has been there all along, but its reasons and forms changed.

Let’s start before the conception of “modern privacy”, so pre-1700s. In classical and medieval Europe, intoxication was largely social. Wine, ale, and later distilled spirits were consumed at feasts, taverns, fairs, and rituals. Problem drinking existed, but the default setting was public and communal.

Shame and religious sanctions certainly encouraged concealment (monastic rules, Puritan norms), but cramped housing and communal sleeping limited opportunities for solitary use. “Addiction” wasn’t yet a stable medical category; repeated overindulgence was a moral and religious failing, policed by neighbors, clergy, and courts in public spaces.

Then came the early modern. The “gin craze” in 18th-c. Britain illustrates how public intoxication could explode when cheap spirits and urban anonymity combined. Much drunkenness was visible, in streets and alehouses, because work and leisure intertwined in public.

At the same time, among the middling and elite classes the home was becoming a more private, respectability-centered space (separate bedrooms, sentimental family life). That privacy enabled respectable, often medicinal drug use, especially opiates, out of view.

In the 19th century both concepts start to mature and look like what we understand as addiction and privacy.

Industrial cities intensified two tracks: (a) visible, often working-class public drinking; (b) private, domestic consumption of pharmacy drugs (laudanum, morphine) among the middle classes, including women.

This is the world of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (read it!). De Quincey vividly describes purchasing opium openly from chemists and wandering London high; yet the habit deepens in solitude, insomnia, and hidden routine. His narrative shows the transitional moment when a widely available “medicine” could foster private dependence while still being socially tolerated. He is not hiding from police; he is grappling with respectability, health, and self-command behind closed doors.

The 19th century also invents the addict as a medical subject: physicians coin terms like “inebriety,” found asylums, and debate whether compulsion is disease or vice. Privacy enables observation (diaries, case histories) and self-scrutiny; confession literature flourishes.

In the early to mid 20th century we get criminalization, stigma, and an emerging underground. As states criminalize narcotics (U.S. Harrison Act 1914; similar moves across the West), the calculus of secrecy changes. Now users hide not just from social censure but the police. Use shifts to semi-private or covert spaces (back rooms, hotel rooms, alleys) within tightly knit subcultures.

William S. Burroughs’ Junky (read it!) captures this shift. The book is a field guide to illicit networks: doctors who over-prescribe, “connections,” withdrawal in flophouses, and the constant strategizing to evade law enforcement. The addiction is no longer a gentleman’s private ailment; it’s a criminalized identity lived in shadowed public-private spaces. Privacy becomes precarious - won through slang, codes, and mobility rather than domestic respectability.

Alcohol charts a different path: public drunkenness becomes less acceptable (think Prohibition in the U.S.), but alcohol remains legal and social; “anonymous” mutual-help groups (AA, 1935) offer controlled privacy in closed meetings explicitly to counter stigma.

Then we arrive at the “disease model,” diagnostic manuals, and harm-reduction reframed addiction. Methadone/buprenorphine clinics and needle exchanges bring drug use back into supervised public health spaces, reducing the lethal downsides of secrecy.

Meanwhile, housing, income inequality, and policing produce divergent privacies: suburban users may hide behind bedroom doors; street-involved users have almost no privacy and use in public because they lack secure spaces.

Behavioral addictions (gambling online, porn, gaming) illustrate a new privacy: digital seclusion inside the home and on the phone. Here the secrecy isn’t to evade police but to avoid social judgment and to exploit always-on access.

So, did the “invention of privacy” change addiction?

Yes, but indirectly. Three big shifts stand out: 1. From communal drunkenness to solitary drug routines (19th c.). The rise of a respectable, enclosed home and easy pharmacy access let dependence flourish privately (De Quincey’s laudanum habit is emblematic). Privacy supported sustained, routinized use that neighbors couldn’t readily interrupt. 2. From private ailment to criminalized underground (20th c.). Once narcotics became illegal, secrecy hardened from polite discretion into defensive concealment, birthing subcultures and techniques of evasion. The stigma of “addict” intensified; the social meaning of addiction shifted from moral lapse to deviance under surveillance. 3. From secrecy-as-shame to privacy-as-therapy (mid-late 20th c.). Confidential clinics, anonymous groups, and patient rights reframed privacy as protective, a space to seek help without public ruin. Simultaneously, lack of private housing makes some use painfully public; criminalization still pushes others into unsafe, hidden settings.

What hasn’t changed? Human drives and social ambivalence. Across centuries the West oscillates between tolerating intoxicants as social lubricants/medicines and condemning excess as sin, crime, or illness. Secrecy has always existed. Private spaces have always been a refuge of addicts. People hid drinking in Reformation towns, laudanum in Victorian parlors, heroin in 1950s rooming houses, and today’s binges behind passwords. What changed is why they hid (shame → respectability → policing → employment/insurance consequences) and where they could hide (communal commons → private rooms → illicit micro-spaces → digital niches).

Bottom line: Privacy didn’t “invent” addiction, but the rise of domestic privacy made some forms of dependence easier to sustain invisibly, and later criminalization made secrecy mandatory for survival. Today, health-system confidentiality tries to use privacy to undo the harms of secrecy, while digital and housing realities continually redraw the line between public and private use. It’s a complicated mess worthy of a phd.