Everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong

Heroin, Dalrymple points out,

• 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.

He notes that heroin addiction is

a moral or spiritual problem.

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-dramatising and dishonest accounts of their 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 useless medical bureaucracy has been set up to deal with the problem.

In heroin’s clutches

Chet Baker

Dalrymple dislikes the implication that

in the relationship between a person and heroin, heroin is the active participant. It is the person who grips the heroin, not the other way round.

The status of heroin addict

is one that is sought after. Once achieved, it is not slavery or enchainment, it is a lack of anything considered important enough to give up for.

Heroin addiction

is another of the myriad ways of fulfilling the human urge to self-destruction.

Smack from the shrink

Anna Kavan

The novelist Anna Kavan, writes Dalrymple,

was for many years dependent on Karl Theodor Bluth, a psychiatrist who had been an exile from Nazi Germany and came to live in England. She found in him a soul mate, and it was he who supplied her, legally, with her heroin, sometimes injecting her with it. Bluth was himself a writer, having published essays in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and a book on the philosophy of Leibnitz.

Anna Kavan, Portrait of Dr Karl Theodor Bluth, gouache on paper, c.1963

Addiction to opiates is a pretend illness

And, Dalrymple writes,

treatment of it 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 swallowed the lies,

is explored in Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, in which Dalrymple explains that

• 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
• heroin addiction is a moral or spiritual problem.

Villainous company hath been the spoil of me

In Henry IV, Part 1 (act 1, scene 2), Falstaff accuses Prince Henry thus:

O, thou hast damnable iteration and art indeed able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal; God forgive thee for it! Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give it over: by the Lord, and I do not, I am a villain: I’ll be damned for never a king’s son in Christendom.

Such rationalisations, writes Dalrymple,

have particular resonance for me because I have heard them a thousand times from my patients (I would not stoop to such rationalisations, of course).

In the prison where Dalrymple works,

practically every heroin-addicted prisoner whom I ask for the reason that he started to take the drug replies: ‘I fell in with the wrong crowd.’ They say this with every appearance of sincerity, but at the same time they know it to be nonsense.

They laugh when Dalrymple says to them

how strange it is that, though I have met many who have fallen in with the wrong crowd, I have never met any member of the wrong crowd itself.

OK, so they joined Isis. It could’ve happened to anybody

Liberal intellectuals, writes Dalrymple,

want to divide humanity into the tiny minority of people with agency (perpetrators) and the vast majority without it (victims)—the latter requiring salvation by liberal intellectuals. The rich and powerful are perpetrators with agency; everyone else is a victim without agency.

Asked why they started taking heroin, addicts say they

fell in with the wrong crowd,

passively,

as if by some kind of natural force.

Isis happens

A newspaper describes some ‘Portsmouth lads’ of Bangladeshi origin as ‘falling into Isis’s hands’.

Victims of circumstance

The use of the word lads is intended to imply that there is nothing special or different about these young men. Its use is a manifestation of wishful or even magical thinking. The men fell into the hands of Isis as an apple falls to the ground by gravitational force. It could have happened to anybody, this going to Syria via Turkey to join a movement that delights in decapitation in the name of a religion—their religion. Joining Isis is like multiple sclerosis; it’s something that just happens to people.

The word fell

denies agency to the young men, as if they had no choice. They were victims of circumstance by virtue of their membership of a minority, for minorities are by definition victims without agency.