Should we be threatening cocaine addicts with execution?

Mao Tse-tung was by far the greatest therapist of drug addiction in world history. He threatened to execute opium addicts if they didn’t give up. Threats to murder were about the only utterances of Mao’s that could be believed, and 20 million addicts duly gave up.

I hope you don’t think that I am advocating Mao’s methods, but it does seem to me that his success tells us something very important about addiction. Mao didn’t say, nor would it have made sense for him to say, I will execute anyone who suffers from hypothyroidism, say, or rheumatoid arthritis; and therefore there must be a category difference between illness and addiction.

In Vietnam, tens of thousands of American soldiers addicted themselves to heroin, torn as they were between terror and boredom; but two years after their return to the States, their rate of addiction to heroin was no greater than that of the draftees who were due to go but never got to Vietnam because the war had ended.