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Press releases
Press Release
Thursday 9 August 2007
Junk Medicine
Harriman House
"Heroin addiction is a myth"
Almost everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong. That's the conclusion of Theordore Dalrymple, author of the new book Junk Medicine. The publication of his controversial views coincides with the continued media debate on UK drugs policy.
Not only is everything you know wrong, but it is obviously wrong. Heroin is not highly addictive; withdrawal from it is not medically serious; addicts do not become criminals to feed their habit; addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin; and contrary to received wisdom, heroin addiction most certainly IS a moral or spiritual problem.
Based on his experience as a prison doctor and as a psychiatrist in a large general hospital in Birmingham, Dr. Dalrymple argues that addiction to heroin is not an illness at all, and that doctors only make it worse. They deceive both the addicts and themselves by pretending that they have something to offer.
In this brilliant, entertaining and provocative book, Theodore Dalrymple explains how and why a literary tradition dating back to De Quincey and Coleridge, and continuing up to the deeply sociopathic William Burroughs and beyond, has misled all Western societies for generations about the nature of heroin addiction. These writers' self-dramatizing and dishonest accounts of their own addiction have been accepted uncritically, and have been more influential by far in forming public attitudes than the whole of pharmacological science. As a result, a self-serving, self-perpetuating and completely useless medical bureaucracy has been set up to deal with the problem.
With scathing wit, implacable logic and savage denunciation, Dr. Dalrymple exposes the mythology surrounding heroin addiction. Moving seamlessly between literature, pharmacology, history and philosophy, he demonstrates what happens when the nature of a social problem is so thoroughly misunderstood, and when human beings are regarded as inanimate objects rather than as agents of their own destiny. His scintillating, iconoclastic little book has an importance far beyond its immediate subject matter.
***
“If an increase in the number of heroin addicts such as Britain has experienced in the last few decades - up from a very few in the 1950s (there were only 62 known cases in Britain in 1958, 67 in 1968, and as late as 1978 there were only 859, when heroin addicts were still few enough to be registered individually by the Home Office, which no doubt underestimated the numbers, but not by orders of magnitude) to well over 100,000 by the year 2000 - constitutes an epidemic, it is an epidemic of a very strange kind, one that is spread by the psychological contagion of bad ideas and bad desires rather than by the physical contagion of bad germs.”
(Page 16, Junk Medicine)
"A manifesto on addiction by a truth-telling psychiatrist who explodes conventional wisdom. With customary wit and literary forays into Coleridge and De Quincey, Dalrymple turns his raw experience into gems of clinical insight. Addicts are not passive, nor are they diseased; but they have managed, Dalrymple argues, to seduce a vast treatment bureaucracy into regarding them as medical victims."
- Sally Satel, M.D., author of PC, M.D
How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine
"Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and Romancing Opiates wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high."
- Kenneth Minogue, professor emeritus at The London School of Economics and author of The Liberal Mind
***
Ends
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
More details can be found online at: www.harriman-house.com/junkmedicine
For further information on this book or its author, please contact Helen McCusker in the PR department at Harriman House:
Tel: +44 (0)1730 233885
Email: pr@harriman-house.com
Harriman House Ltd, 3A Penns Road, Petersfield, Hampshire, GU32 2EW
