Writing for the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, Steven Poole reviewed
the following book:

Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, by Theodore
Dalrymple (Harriman House, £14.99)

This book blasts open with baleful force: "Addiction to opiates is a
pretend rather than a real illness, treatment of which is pretend rather
than real treatment." From his experience as a prison doctor, and his
citations of medical literature, Dalrymple concludes that going cold
turkey from heroin is not that big a deal (not as medically dangerous,
for instance, as alcohol withdrawal), but that the bureaucracy of "help"
for addicts is self-sustaining, since demand (from addicts persuaded
that they need such help) increases to meet the professional
self-interest of an ever-expanding supply.

Interesting if true; but the argument appears also to depend on a tacit
assumption that what is mainly or completely psychological cannot be a
"real" illness. There is also a marvellously eccentric and angry strain
of the book that blames the origin of the heroin "myth" on literature
(Coleridge, De Quincey). That's just talking smack.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2179276,00.html

A wikipedia search suggests Dalrymple to be the pen name used by Anthony
Daniels, "an English writer and retired physician" (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple), though I have not
heard of this person before today. Perhaps others have? Anyway, the
review is interesting, not least because it opens with quite a clear
statement of Szasz's position. I do not know if Dalrymple refers to
Szasz at all. Perhaps other group members can confirm/deny this? If he
does not, might the omission be strategic in nature?

Implying fault with Dalrymple's suggestion that there cannot be any
psychological illness, Poole (to his credit?) gives the question some
attention in what is certainly a popular British broadsheet. One might
think the left, at least compared to the right, could be persuaded that
the liberty to consume (or, in fact, to merely possess) certain
substances is an important - perhaps critical - constituent of a free
society. Probably not though. Sadly, the front page of the same
newspaper ran with the headline "Cost of UK's gambling habit: £10bn".
Still, at least only "one in nine people who played touch-screen
roulette were classified as addictive or problem gamblers - the
strongest link in any form of gambling."
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2179881,00.html) The only
book I have to hand is Words to the Wise, in which Szasz addresses the
problem of gambling by quoting a psychologist who talks of brain
chemicals, the noradrenergic system, ruined marraiges, the loss of jobs,
etc., before Szasz tells us "I prefer my definition of the pathological
gambler as a gambler who loses money, not his wife". (p48)




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