In what must be his ultimate gamble, a 28-year-old greyhound trainer is putting his savings towards the cost of taking the bookmaker William Hill to the High Court. Should he win, he is claiming £2.1 million - the amount of the losses that he attributes to their negligence for having allowed him to place the bets in the first place, given that they knew he was a gambling “addict”.

His sorry story comes only days after that of a young woman (also after a few bob) whose skin is falling in grotesque flaps from her body, courtesy of several years of twice-daily artificial tanning sessions. She spotted the start of the damage ages ago, mind - but continued because she is a sunbed “addict”.

Rarely has the abuse of a single word gained such widespread currency in so brief a period. Once upon a time, though it might not have been strictly dictionary-proof, consensus decreed what addiction meant: seedy, desperate people in chemical thrall to substances of destruction; narcotics, say, or alcohol.

Now we have among us those “addicted” to sex (thank you, Michael Douglas) with, as specialist off-shoots, “addictions” to pornography or prostitution; we have “addictions” to chocolate, the internet, snuff movies, driving too fast, shopping and its sister-in-spirit, shoplifting. In short, anything that we enjoy doing may be continued to witless excess, as long as we pathologise it; only the hardest of hearts, after all, could call a sickness our own damned fault.

Colluding with this is an expanding, lucrative industry - for once all are agreed that a chap is poorly, someone can charge for making him better. And so we see clinics happy to diagnose and treat, preferably in costly residential care, as well as phalanxes of therapists delighted to remove responsibility or blame from “patients” in return for a fast buck. Reinforcing them, in turn, are the pop-science daily newspaper stories declaring that there actually is a chemical basis to the problems - usually the stimulation of adrenaline - so, no, really, the girl can't help it.

The by-product of this, of course, is that to abdicate self-control in favour of self-indulgence, to defer to weakness over strength and to make the pathetic more desirable than the proud relies upon the eradication of many more useful, socially sustaining attributes: stoicism, competence, dignity and tenacity among them.

Meanwhile, the coming lawsuits seek to take the issue a critical step further: not only is his behaviour not the plaintiff's fault - it is, unto the point of punishment, somebody else's. Further still: given that High Court action is hugely dramatic, attracts a great deal of attention and - yes! - stimulates the flow of adrenaline, these cases introduce the ghastly possibility of whole bunches of new victims, each crying “addiction” to litigation. In fact, I'd bet the farm on it.

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