According to functionalists, apparently addictive behavior patterns are best regarded as eminently rational, if painful and socially notorious, adaptations to social structural conditions. Functionalist approaches tended to stereotype addicts as necessarily socially disadvantaged and to sometimes confuse the trappings of poverty with the trappings of addiction. Moreover, they remained conspicuously silent on the question of whether addictive behavior ought to be understood as involuntary or merely socially disapproved, largely forsaking attention to the former in favor of the later. But they did have the virtue of freeing sociological research from the presumption of a brute biological basis for addiction and of allowing sociologists to entertain the possibility that people might experience drug problems simply as a result of how they had learned to use these substances to cope with the social structural circumstances of their lives.