Drug of choice

Theodore Dalrymple flips conventional assumptions about heroin addiction | Marvin Olasky

This month brings publication of the revised paperback edition of Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (Encounter Books). It's an extraordinary look at heroin addiction, based on British author Theodore Dalrymple's experience as a prison doctor and hospital psychiatrist.

Dalrymple is used to turning standard assumptions upside down. In an extraordinary book published in 2001, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Dalrymple notes that today's poor are not particularly poor "by the standards of human history," but many are trapped in "a special wretchedness" of passivity: The classic statement is that of the murderer who says "the knife went in." Dalrymple explains that liberal social determinism has taught many among the poor to ignore personal responsibility for actions.