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| Home > Reviews > Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy by Theodore Dalrymple |
| Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy by Theodore Dalrymple | | Date Created: Aug 05, 2006, 06:02 PM |
 I tend to agree with Dr. Dalrymple...
From the jacket blurb:
"Almost everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it is obviously wrong. Heroin is not highly addictive; withdrawal from it is not medically serious; addicts do not become criminals to feed their habit; addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin; and contrary to received wisdom, heroin addiction most certainly IS a moral or spiritual problem."
By "moral" or "spiritual", he doesn't mean what US Americans would take it to be. He's a British psychiatrist. He means it's a personal problem or what we might call a psychological problem. "values" or "God" has nothing to do with his analysis.
Here's from the introduction:
"Romancing Opiates draws the appropriate conclusion from this: that addiction to opiates is a pretend rather than a real illness, treament of which is pretend rather than real treatment. How and why addicts came to lie to doctors, how and why doctors came to return the compliment, and how and why society in general swallowed the lies wholesale, is explored in this book."
Make you want to read it yet? Here's more.
"Romantic claptrap invests intoxication by opiates with a philosophical significance beyond mere self-indulgence. The idea is that an addled brain is capable of insights into the nature of existence deeper than those produced by the clearest mind. It also encourages people to suppose that rebellion against society, in the form of such intoxication, is a good in itself, and is self-justifying, no matter what is being rebelled against or what the consequences might be, personal or social. It elevates feeling and intuition above knowledge and thought in the pantheon of human desiderata. It invests the personal pettiness of addiction with the aura of titanic and tormenting struggles against mighty forces, while at the same time implying that there is a connection between opiates, talent, creativity and genius. It encourages histrionic self-dramatization, to the detriment of real character...
I suppose the self-deception could be defined as untruth that one easily recognizes as such when uttered by another, but unrecognized (though of course not unrecognizable) when uttered by onself."
That latter has a general application that is very powerful. No one is immune.
"Why is there such wide acceptance of it? For many of the reasons that non-addicted writers accept it. In addition, there is very little opposition to it: it has become an almost unassailable dogma. Moreover, the public likes victim groups on which it can expend compassion vicariously, at no real cost to itself. But in order for victim groups to be worthy of compassion, they must be entirely free of blame or responsibility for their misfortunes. It is the blamelessness of victims that confers their high moral standing. That is why the imagery of addiction as enslavement is so popular."
So in conclusion:
"It should be clear by now that the causes of opiate addiction, and the reasons why it is maintained, have nothing to do with medicine as a discipline. The addict has a problem, but it is not a medical one: he does not know how to live. And on this subject the doctor has nothing, qua doctor, to offer. What he ought not do, however, is to mislead the addict, or allow the addict to mislead him, into thinking that the problem is medical and requires, or is susceptible to, a medical solution.
Contrary to our current pieties, therefore, which give those who subscribe to them a comfortable warm glow of generosity of spirit, but which are actually dehumanizing because they reduce addicts to the status of mere physiological specimens or preparations in a laboratory, addiction is a moral weakness par excellence. Moreover, addicts tend to be bad people (if bad people are those who consistently behave badly). They usually impose costs, often very severe costs, on other people without giving anything in return. Their lives are usually selfish and self-centred. Susceptibility arising from their pre-addiction circumstances is at best a mitigation, not a complete excuse. This is not to say that they are necessarily the worst people who exist, or that they are irredeemably bad (it is one of the theses of this book, after all, that they can, and often do, redeem themselves): but bad they are so long as they maintain themselves in their addiction. Addicts should therefore be stigmatized far more than they are. It is perfectly just that they should be and it could be beneficial as well, in the absence of medical 'treatment'."
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