Addiction medicine

The word at the centre of this list, die Sucht, looks as if it were made from suchen, to search, and plenty of native speakers take it that way. It is not. It belongs with the old adjective siech, sick, and originally meant illness of any kind. That older sense still lives in words nobody connects with drugs: die Gelbsucht is jaundice, and die Schwindsucht was the everyday name for tuberculosis. Read that way, the compounds in this list make better sense. Der Suchtdruck is not a hunt for something but a pressure that comes from a condition, and das Suchtgedächtnis is the trace that condition leaves behind. The clinic’s language, which describes rather than blames, turns out to be closer to the history of the word than everyday talk about people who are supposedly always searching for the next thing.