[Child of the 7th Age]

I think you have all made legitimate points regarding how the desire for the Ring resembles the kind of pull a drug addict feels. In the context of our own society, we're constantly exposed to the problem of drug addiction whether through the media, lessons students are taught in school, or even the examples that some of us have seen among family and friends. Because of this, it's easy for us to understand the addicting power of the Ring if we think about it in terms of drug addiction.

This is also the model that PJ used in the movie, in the way that he portrayed both Gollum and Frodo. Gollum was a full blow "addict", with Frodo gradually falling under the influence. I even remember reading an early interview where PJ stated that this was the conscious model he planned to use. Just looking at Frodo when he thinks about the Ring, how his face sweats and his face distorts, certainly confirms this.

Yet, I'm not wholly comfortable with this image. Drugs have been around a long time, but I don't think this is mainly what JRRT had in mind when he thought about the Ring. Growing up in the Edwardian era, and spendng years studying and teaching philology, he had a frame of reference that was different than ours. I think he thought more in terms of paradigms from ancient Norse myth, the Bible, and other things that were close to his heart and experience.

Things like Man's desire to dominate and to escape death were central to his mind. To put it in old fashioned terms, I think he felt Men were irrisistably flawed and drawn to evil, and could overcome that only with enormous effort (and they would never completely succeed!). Drug addiction is one example of that, but it's not the whole picture.

The wider picture is our fallen nature which made us prone to whatever addicting evil comes along--whether the desire to dominate through magic or technology that JRRT depicts in LotR, or the modern instance of drug addiction. It is Man's general nature rather than a specfic evil that accounts for the lure of the Ring.