Addiction is pervasively present within the criminal justice sector, requiring legal professionals to deal with addicted defendants on a regular basis and having to assess the influence of addiction on responsibility. Over the last decades, addiction has increasingly been conceptualised as a brain disease, which arguably could alter the law’s current approach towards the criminal liability of addicted defendants. In this thesis, an overview of the different ways of conceptualising addiction is provided, before applying this knowledge onto the legal framework of Dutch criminal law. As such, the compatibility of concepts such as intent, premeditation, insanity, diminished responsibility and prior fault, with potentially impaired capacities stemming from addiction, is critically examined.