" One of the classical descriptions of addictions is based on the observation that addicts will continue to use even in the face of high costs. This can be quantified through the economic concept of elasticity as a measure of how much one's willingness to buy something changes by its cost. Things that diminish slowly by cost are inelastic. Researchers have suggested that drugs are fundamentally inelastic: as costs increase, the number of rewards paid for decrease less than they should. Of course, there are many things that are inelastic that are not considered addictive - oxygen, for example (where the withdrawal symptoms are particularly traumatic), but also some behaviors continued even in the face of high costs are celebrated, such as Kerri Strug's 1996 Olympic vault performed on a sprained ankle, or Osip Mandelstam continuing to write poetry even after Stalin had thrown him in the gulag for it. "

― A. David Redish