An old-fashioned approach to drug addiction
GARY MASON
VANCOUVER -- Backers of Vancouver's safe injection site better hope Stephen Harper doesn't get his hands on a new book that takes a decidedly different view on heroin addiction and harm-reduction strategy.
The book is Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. It is written by Theodore Dalrymple, whose real name is Anthony Daniels.
Mr. Daniels is a recently retired psychiatrist who worked in Britain's hospitals and prison system for years. When London's The Spectator approached him to write an occasional column about his prison experiences, Mr. Daniels decided to use a pseudonym. He and an editor came up with Theodore Dalrymple.
"We figured it sounded suitably old-fashioned and ill-tempered," Mr. Daniels explained yesterday by telephone from Ardèche, France, where he now lives with his wife.
Old-fashioned is what many would call his views on drug addiction.
Especially people like Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan and the boisterous supporters of the safe injection site for intravenous drug users. The project, known as Insite, will be closed Sept. 12 unless the federal government extends its mandate.
So far, the Prime Minister has been non-committal.
Mr. Daniels wouldn't keep it open. He doesn't believe the people who use it, to shoot up their own heroin with clean needles supplied by the centre, are sick or deserve our help.
"I suppose the argument for the safe injection site is it would reduce the number of deaths," he said. "But I don't see why we should reduce the number of deaths. It is not our responsibility to do so. It's the responsibility of the addicts themselves.
"If they want to inject themselves with heroin it's a very bad choice. If people die from it, I don't feel any particular guilt because I don't feel any responsibility for it."
Needless to say, that is not a view heard much around these parts.
Mr. Daniels believes that if consequences are removed for people's actions, the very idea of human agency disappears. Life would have no meaning if there were no consequences for our actions.
"If we actually say to people, 'Do what you want and when it turns out the consequences are dreadful we'll take over,' then we allow people to continue down that path," said Mr. Daniels, whose book has made waves in Britain. "We are simply reinforcing bad behaviour."
Mr. Daniels said he is not without compassion; he understands that many addicts are products of their environments. Many have had horrible upbringings. But that doesn't justify a drug-reduction strategy that is, in his view, fundamentally infantilizing.
"Doctors lie to addicts and addicts lie back," he said. "The addicts pretend to be ill and doctors pretend to treat them. But there is no treatment because there is nothing wrong with the addicts. It's a matter of empirical fact that everything we think we know about heroin addiction is wrong."
For instance, Mr. Daniels said, one of the great myths that has been built up around heroin addiction concerns withdrawal. He said the side effects are not nearly as bad as addicts would have you believe. The delirium tremors alcoholics experience are far more serious.
When he worked in a Birmingham prison, addicts would come to him to be examined. He sometimes watched them in the waiting room before they entered his consulting room. Often they would be laughing and joking. As soon as they walked through his door they would be moaning and holding their stomach, pleading for a prescription drug to dull their pain.
When he told them he'd witnessed them laughing and joking minutes earlier, the addicts would often say: "Well, it was worth a try."
"This is a very common experience and yet we systematically overlook the meaning of it," said Mr. Daniels. "Scores of thousands of American servicemen addicted themselves to heroin in Vietnam. When they came home most gave it up without any treatment. It can be done."
And Mao Zedong convinced 20 million Chinese to kick opium -- by threatening to kill them. "Not likely an option today," Mr. Daniels conceded.
He said a whole addiction bureaucracy has been established and thrives by propagating the notion that heroin and cocaine addicts are ill. In fact, he suggested, people treating the addicts need addicts far more than the addicts need them.
"Now you're going to ask, do I have a solution? And the answer is no," said Mr. Daniels.
"As long as man wishes to escape from the existential limitations and difficulties of his existence, then finding bliss at the end of a needle will always seem a viable alternative.
"And I have no answer for that."
gmason@globeandmail.com
