The line of least resistance

This is a book about drugs, drug addicts, and the people who try to help drug addicts — and the author, a prison doctor, thinks we’ve got it all wrong. For instance, most people think of heroin addiction as something like a terrible disease. We also tend to think that withdrawal from heroin is an appalling physical ordeal. Not so, says Theodore Dalrymple. ‘Addiction to opiates,’ he tells us, ‘is a pretend rather than a real illness, treatment of which is pretend rather than real treatment.’

This is a bold assertion, and I know some people who find it offensive, but it’s worth following Dalrymple’s logic. As a prison doctor, he tells us, he’s seen a rise in the use of heroin in the last few years, and, quite rightly, he doesn’t find this surprising. Here are lots of people living lives he describes as ‘grim’, and here is a substance which offers ‘reverie followed by oblivion’.