Romancing opiates

I don't agree very often with Theodore Dalyrimple (I don't even believe that's a real name), but he starts off his essay credibly.

This romantic nonsense has been accepted wholesale by doctors and litterateurs for nearly two centuries. It has given rise to an orthodoxy about opiate addiction, including heroin addiction, that the general public likewise takes for granted: To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit. He cannot abandon the habit except under medical supervision, often by means of a substitute drug.

In each and every particular, this picture is not only mistaken, but obviously mistaken. It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction. Like many people who are able to take opiates intermittently, De Quincey took opium every week for several years before becoming habituated to it. William Burroughs, who lied about many things, admitted truthfully that you may take heroin many times, and for quite a long period, before becoming addicted.

Heroin doesn't hook people; rather, people hook heroin. It is quite untrue that withdrawal from heroin or other opiates is a serious business, so serious that it would justify or at least mitigate the commission of crimes such as mugging. Withdrawal effects from opiates are trivial, medically speaking (unlike those from alcohol, barbiturates or even, on occasion, benzodiazepines such as valium), and experiment demonstrates that they are largely, though not entirely, psychological in origin. Lurid descriptions in books and depictions in films exaggerate them à la De Quincey (and also Coleridge, who was a chronic self-dramatizer).

Very true. Jim Carroll's "The Basketball Diaries" also makes clear that heroin addicts get there of their own volition.

But I would have expected that Dalyrimple would have made the logical conclusion, that the very basis of the insistence that marijuana must remain a Class D drug and can never, ever be legalized because it is a "gateway drug," is, to borrow Dalyrimple's phrase, "poppycock."

If heroin is not the instant addict creator those who "romance opiates" insist, then surely a joint in the hand is not a syringe in the bush.

But Dalyrimple takes an odd turn and simply scolds heroin users for being whiny and duplicitous. And drug therapists for being greedy.

Addicts want to place the responsibility for their plight elsewhere, and the orthodox view is the very raison d'être of the therapists.

And the raison d'être of our drug warriors as well.