‘Romancing opiates’ - the nature of addiction

For their part, the compassion police treat addicts as wounded babies. In some circles they’re celebrity victims. No abuse excuse is too awful to buy. And addicts almost always have an excuse to sell. “It was the addiction wot dunnit,” they’ll say.

“Theodore Dalrymple is,” according to Kenneth Minogue, professor emeritus at the London School of Economics “a brilliant observer of both medicine and society,” and inarguably one of England’s greatest essayists. Thus, he deserves a larger audience.

And, one should note that drug-taking criminals commit crimes before they first took drugs. In Dalrymple’s observations, many lawbreakers committed between 50 and several hundred crimes before they even took heroin. Nevertheless, abuse excuses are abuse excuses. The chattering classes, after all, see addicts through their politics.

It is scarcely surprising too, that heroin addicts feel little compassion for their fellow junkies. They, after all, are playing the same game, and competing for the affections of paternalistic bureaucrats, and mummy figures.

In Sydney, Australia, some experts have embraced silly projects: “safe injecting” rooms, say. But after weighing up the pro and con arguments, Darlymple stands against legalisation. He stands for reason. He rightly stands up for taxpayer slaves.

Finally, Dalrymple asks that all socially correct drug clinics shut shop. On the other hand, he asserts, “doctors should treat addicts only for serious physical complications of drug addictions: abscesses, viral infections and the like,” as reason maintains.

The addiction ladder is manmade, and it can be unmade by “unmentionable facts”. I, for one, am terribly tired of the paternalistic medical model, and applaud Dalrymple for encouraging us all to think about the many ways in which it “infantilises the subject.”

Most bravely, Dalrymple states that, “In short, the bureaucracy of drug addiction needs drug addicts far more than drug addicts need the bureaucracy of drug addiction”. You see, there really are uncomfortable moral issues on both sides. Mommies love to nurture their junkies. They’re addicts too.