By Adam McCulloch
Uh-oh. Social workers are coming in for some stick again.
This time indirectly, but there it is in black and white:
“What, perhaps, is more surprising is that many doctors, therapists and social workers swallow such nonsense. The truth is people who are genuinely exposed to strong opiates by chance, such as after an operation, rarely become addicted to them”
We are talking about heroin or I suppose any class A drug addiction and society’s attitudes towards it.
As the parents of Amy Winehouse and her husband Blake Fielder-Civil publicly battle over how to handle their desperately wayward drug-using offspring, Theodore Dalyrymple, a writer and former experienced hospital and prison doctor, has published a book setting out where the UK has gone wrong in its treatment of heroin users.
His main point is that heroin use is a lifestyle choice made by people deliberately choosing to live that way; it is not in any sense an illness – people do not become addicted by accident. He states that it takes a long time to become an addict, with most having to work at it, and that going cold turkey is much easier than many self-serving and self pitying drug abusers have described. Certainly, going cold turkey is not a serious medical problem he says.
OK, so where does this all lead? How should this change the way the health service and social services should intervene? Dalrymple wants the government to stop wasting millions on conventional treatment services. Social workers’ role, presumably, would be to convince users that only they, the user, can deal with their “problem” by choosing a different lifestyle and realizing that they have the power to change, whereas services do not.
He fondly cites Chairman Mao’s threat to shoot all drug addicts; a threat that apparently worked wonders for addiction rates.
We would rather believe that service user empowerment – drug users deciding for themselves that they need to change – would do the trick. Maybe there’s hope yet for Amy and Blake.
Interested in reading more articles by Theo Dalrymple that you might disagree with? Try his latest piece for The Times on prisons.
Comments (1)
It is unlikely that Chairman Mao was minded to utter that stock phrase of the rabid right: "Shooting's too good for them." Being of the left, the Chinese leader was always likely to take the opposite view and indeed thought that shooting was a suitable response to drug addiction. But we can all point to wars on drugs by extremist governments - and I don't mean President Bush's here - that have diminished supply. The Taliban's razing of the poppy fields springs to mind - but here in the West we didn't care much for the aggressive nature of their foreign policy and have allowed "democratic" Afghanistan to re-emerge as a dominant supplier of dangerous narcotics. Perhaps as one of that country's two main occupiers, we should look at ourselves when we complain about the availability of heroin as well as simply lambast the user.
However, Theo Dalrymple does raise an important point in opening a debate about whether drug addiction is an illness. The same argument applies to alcoholism. Is it an addiction or a lifestyle choice? Certainly there has been enough publicity about drugs in recent decades to keep the average advertising creative in cocaine for many an end-line. So perhaps it is a choice. After all, would you eat a sandwich from a package labelled "Contains salmonella"? Oh hang on, it's not de rigueur to admit to salmonella poisioning. Not unless you are seeking admission to Attention Seekers Notorious. And in that fictitious name may lie the answer.
Posted by Mike McNabb | September 3, 2007 3:32 PM
Posted on September 3, 2007 15:32