Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction BureaucracyTheodore Dalrymple believes that almost everything people know about opiate addiction is wrong. Most flawed of all is the notion that addicts are in touch with profound mysteries of which non-addicts are ignorant. Dalrymple shows that doctors, psychologists and social workers, all of them uncritically accepting addicts' descriptions of addiction, have employed literary myths (drugs are creative and intense) in constructing an equal and opposite myth of quasi-treatment. Using evidence from literature and pharmacology and drawing on examples from his own clinical experience, Dalrymple shows that addiction is not a disease, but a response to personal and existential problems. He argues that withdrawal from opiates is not the serious medical condition, but a relatively trivial experience and says that criminality causes addiction far more often than addiction causes criminality. |
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Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy Theodore Dalrymple No preview available - 2008 |
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agony alcohol become addicted believed benzodiazepines buprenorphine bureaucracy Burroughs called caused Coleridge Coleridge's condition consumption course crime criminal cure delirium tremens demonstrated distress doctor dose doubt drawal dreams drug addicts drug clinics effect exaggeration example experience fact feel give habit harm heroin addiction horrors of withdrawal hospital human ical increase inject Kubla Khan laudanum least literary tradition lives M. H. Abrams means Melvin Burgess mind moral morphine Naked Lunch naloxone nature never number of deaths once opiate addiction opioid opium pain patients percent person philosophical pleasure prescribed methadone prescription of methadone prison problem Quincey Quincey's reduce rience romantic sense smoke social society someone standard view suffering supposed taking heroin taking opiates terrible things thought tion took Trainspotting treatment true truth William Burroughs withdraw from heroin withdrawal from opiates withdrawal symptoms words workers writing wrong crowd wrote young