Journal of Health Services Research & Policy > Volume 13, Number 2 > Pp. 124-126

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Dalrymple, T. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Social Bookmarking                      What's this?

Perspective

Doctors, lies and the addiction bureaucracy

Theodore Dalrymple 

Correspondence to: christine.rivett-carnac{at}lshtm.ac.uk

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. 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.

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?