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. Based on his experience as a
prison doctor and as a psychiatrist in a large general
hospital in Birmingham, Dr. Dalrymple argues that
addiction to heroin is not an illness at all, and that
doctors only make it worse. They deceive both the
addicts and themselves by pretending that they have
something to offer. In this brilliant, entertaining and
provocative book, Theodore Dalrymple explains how and
why a literary tradition dating back to De Quincey and
Coleridge, and continuing up to the deeply sociopathic
William Burroughs and beyond, has misled all Western
societies for generations about the nature of heroin
addiction. These writers' self-dramatizing and dishonest
accounts of their own addiction have been accepted
uncritically, and have been more influential by far in
forming public attitudes than the whole of
pharmacological science. As a result, a self-serving,
self-perpetuating and completely useless medical
bureaucracy has been set up to deal with the problem.
With scathing wit, implacable logic and savage
denunciation, Dr. Dalrymple exposes the mythology
surrounding heroin addiction. Moving seamlessly between
literature, pharmacology, history and philosophy, he
demonstrates what happens when the nature of a social
problem is so thoroughly misunderstood, and when human
beings are regarded as inanimate objects rather than as
agents of their own destiny. His scintillating,
iconoclastic little book has an importance far beyond
its immediate subject matter.
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