Does Johann Hari Agree with me that 'Addiction' is a Fiction? This may surprise you

I’m watching with interest the largely positive reviews which Johann Hari’s new book on drugs ('Chasing the Scream')is collecting, compared with the near-universal silence (tempered with personal abuse) which my own rather different book (‘The War We Never Fought’) on the same subject received.

 

I’m due to discuss it with him at the Hay Festival in May (this event, the funky Glastonbury of the book world, two years ago invited me to discuss my book, then abruptly disinvited me. It'll be nice to get in again, even if I only do so in Mr Hari's baggage rather than in my own right.).

 

I’m actually quite glad to see Mr Hari’s success. I’ve never disliked him, have always found him charming in person,  and regarded his terrible fall from grace (over plagiarism and various other misdeeds) as a sad and embarrassing matter rather than an opportunity to say rude things about him

 

But I do think the comparison between the treatment of the two books is telling. They share  the same publisher, are about the same very interesting and current subject, and in both cases the author  is reasonably prominent but not especially beloved.

 

Even more fascinating is the fact that Mr Hari comes very close indeed to committing the same heresy which I commit, to howls of execration – suggesting that ‘addiction’, as a physical phenomenon, does not in fact exist. In fact, he may actually commit it. See for yourselves what you think. But there are no howls, there is no execration, for him.

 

Mr Hari has kindly sent me a copy of his book as published (until now I was working from proofs which of course are not final or definitive).

 

The first thing I checked was a passage beginning on page 170. This is in a chapter about Bruce Alexander, a Canadian academic .

 

Now read on

‘There were big chunks of time in the 1970s in which the Canadian police managed to blockade the port of Vancouver so successfully that no heroin was getting into the city at all. We know this because the police tested the “heroin” being sold on the streets and found it actually contained zero percent of the drug.: it was all filler and contaminants. So the war on drugs was, for some significant stretches being won here.

‘It is obvious what should have happened during these heroin droughts. The heroin addicts should all have been plunged into physical withdrawal, writhing in agony, and then, weeks later they should have woken up to find they were freed from their physical dependency.

‘But Bruce was seeing something really weird instead. There was no heroin in the city – but all the heroin addicts were carrying on almost exactly as before. They were still scrambling desperately to raise the money – robbing or prostituting – to buy this empty cocktail. They weren’t in agonizing withdrawal. They weren’t getting gut-wrenchingly sick. They thought the “heroin” they were buying was weak, to be sure, and they were topping it up with heavier drinking or more Valium. But the core of their addiction didn’t seem to be affected. Nothing had changed’.

 

Mr Hari goes to state that this was not a freak event but was replicated in several American cities.

 

He goes on ‘Bruce saw addicts in withdrawal all the time - and their symptoms were often minor: at worst, like a bad flu. This is so contrary to what we are told that it seems impossible, but doctors now very broadly agree it is the case. The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.’

 

Of course, it’s partly because it’s padded with undisproveable, unproveable psychobabble like that last sentence that Mr Hari can get away with this . The facts he recounts here are almost identical to what Theodore Dalyrmple, the former English prison doctor, has said about ‘withdrawal’.  And it is indeed ‘contrary to all we are told’ especially in films such as ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘French Connection 2’.

 

Well, could that be because ‘everything we are told’,is in fact twaddle, widely believed by people who want to believe it and have never examined the matter because, thanks to conventional wisdom, they think they know something they don't?

Mr Hari goes on (p.171) to quote the medical researchers John Ball and Carl Chambers who, he says, studied medical literature from 1875 to 1968, and found that nobody had died from heroin withdrawal *alone* in that time. ‘The only people who are killed by withdrawal’’, Mr Hari says ‘ are people who are already very weak’.

 

There’s a brief diversion after this about an experiment called ‘rat park’ which suggests that heroin abuse has more to do with unhappiness than physical compulsion, which you can take or leave depending on how similar you think humans are to rats, and whether rats feel,’ unhappiness’ in a way that is remotely comparable to human emotions.

 

If we leave such concepts as ‘happiness’ out of the calculation and concede (which is obvious) that euphoria-inducing drugs are bound to appeal to some (but not all) people who cannot physically escape from unpleasant, unwanted circumstances; and if you accept that the fact they are bound to appeal does not in any way mean that the decision to take such drugs is anything other than a matter of voluntary choice which some may view as wrong and immoral, …

 

…in that case, there’s some very interesting material on page 173 of Mr Hari’s book..

According to research cited by Mr Hari, from ‘The Archives of General Pyschiatry’, some 20 per cent of US soldiers serving in Vietnam (where, you will recall, they were almost all conscripts) had ‘become addicted to’ heroin while there.

 

The study showed that 95% of these men had stopped using heroin within a year of returning home. ’Treatment’ and ‘rehabilitation’ made no difference to this outcome.

 

As Mr Hari writes ‘If you believe the theory that drugs hijack your brain and turn you into a chemical slave  – the theory on which the war on drugs has been based since [Harry] Anslinger [head of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the 1930s, cited by Mr Hari as one of the originators of the war on drugs’]- then this makes no sense’.

 

Indeed it doesn’t, and I have frequent disputes with my allies in the anti-legalisation movement, about their too ready and ultimately self-weakening acceptance of the concept of ‘addiction’. I think the use of the term by drug opponents is lazy,  contradictory and morally confusing and eventually puts them in a  false position.  That’s why I’d rather risk the opprobrium and abuse that comes my way for agreeing with Mr Hari that the classic concept of ‘addiction’ is logically and scientifically untenable.

 

My conclusions from this are quite different from his. He excuses drugtaking as a response to bad conditions and so rejects the punishment of possession . But that is because our fundamental moral positions are opposed. This argument has always been far more about morals than about anything else. And what Mr Hari has written in his book makes that even plainer. I wonder why his sympathetic reviewers who(unsurprisingly) tend to be in favur of relaxing the drug laws, haven't fastened on this passage, as they would undoubtedly have done had I written it.