Dr Theodore Dalrymple tears into 'Doctors, lies and the addiction bureaucracy':
"For the past 14 years, I have worked as a doctor in a large general hospital in a deprived area of Britain, and in the even larger prison next door.
In that time, I have seen heroin addiction rise from an infrequently encountered problem to a mass phenomenon.
It has now become so widespread that the city council has politely asked residents not to put used needles and syringes in the weekly rubbish collections.
No stairwell in any housing estate is complete without the discarded paraphernalia of drug abuse."
[...]
"I had briefly run a drug-addiction clinic in a famous university town, at a time when I accepted what I now know to be myths about heroin addiction.
But as more addicts came to my attention – I see up to 20 new cases a day in prison – I began to think about it more. The medical perspective, that these people were ill and in need of treatment, seemed less and less convincing.
I discovered that most addicted prisoners stopped taking heroin in jail, even when it was available. They came into the prison starving and miserable, and went out relatively healthy.
But within a few months, many were back in their former condition, and when brought once more before the courts, some would beg to be imprisoned.
When, soon after their return, I asked them whether they intended to give up taking heroin, some would reply: "I'll have to, I've got no choice."
Asked why, they would offer replies such as: "Because my girlfriend's just had a baby and she won't let me see it unless I do."
This answer was a strange one if these addicts truly thought of themselves as ill and in need of treatment. #
Instead, they clearly believed a purpose in life was enough to enable them to abstain. This is not how pneumonia, for instance, is cured.
No one would say: "I must stop having pleuritic pain each time I breathe deeply because I have just had a baby." Yet the medical services allow addicts to focus exclusively on the physiological aspects of addiction, which in practice means the prescription of a drug such as methadone.
There is a strenuous, almost outraged, rejection of the idea that addiction is, at bottom, a moral problem, or even that it raises any moral questions at all.
Of course, addiction to heroin and other opiates has serious medical consequences. I often saw addicts with deep vein thromboses or multiple abscesses; they would have TB; they would be malnourished and infected with Hepatitis B or C, or both, and HIV.
It would be difficult to obtain blood from the veins in their arms or legs because they had injected so often.
But medical consequences do not make a disease. Many mountaineers get frostbite, but mountaineering is not a disease.
To conceive of heroin addiction as such seems to me to miss the fundamental point: it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment."
Full article here.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Hitchens on Anglo-French relations
The wonderfully grumpy Peter Hitchens has a bone to pick with all of the French bashers out there.
"French Military Victories
I am so irritated by the stupid supposed joke on Google, where a search for 'French Military Victories' produces the response "Your search did not match any documents" and asks 'Did you mean 'French military defeats'?' Oh, ha ha. How unimprovably witty and trenchant. And, since the origin of the jape is almost certainly American, how very ignorant and stupid.
The single most important French military victory in history was of course at Yorktown (accompanied by the related naval battle of the Chesapeake), where the Comte de Rochambeau on land (aided by the Marquis de La Fayette) and the Comte de Grasse by sea defeated British forces and so secured victory for the American colonists, changing the history of the entire world forever. The United States would not even exist if these victories had not happened. Do Americans really not know this stuff any more?
My irritation is partly because I rather like France, and about which American neo-conservatives are especially absurd. For some reason 'right-wing' people are supposed to abominate France and foreigners in general. I have never really understood this. Since the moment I first set foot in France in 1965 ( via the old 'Golden Arrow' that then still ran between London and Paris, steam-hauled by an enormous black locomotive with a surprisingly effeminate whistle, from Calais to Amiens) I have looked on it as a place from which Britain can learn a great deal about the arts of life.
And there are of course plenty of other French military victories, from Valmy, Jena, Marengo, Friedland, and Austerlitz to the clashes that drove the Austrians out of Italy and the great battles on the Marne which stopped the Germans in 1914. And partly because, just at the moment, I am deep into a book 'That Sweet Enemy', which describes the curious relation between two of the world's longest-enduring nations.
The book, wittily and enjoyably written by an English historian and his French wife (Robert and Isabelle Tombs) has the charm of a lot of oblique history. Seen from a slightly different angle, events which you thought you knew about suddenly look different and often more interesting.
It is as if, after growing used to what you thought was a superb view of an ancient and fascinating city from a northerly hilltop, you one day travelled to the opposite side, and saw it for the first time from the south. It is the same place, but lit up and arranged in a way which makes you realise you had missed half the point before."
"French Military Victories
I am so irritated by the stupid supposed joke on Google, where a search for 'French Military Victories' produces the response "Your search did not match any documents" and asks 'Did you mean 'French military defeats'?' Oh, ha ha. How unimprovably witty and trenchant. And, since the origin of the jape is almost certainly American, how very ignorant and stupid.
The single most important French military victory in history was of course at Yorktown (accompanied by the related naval battle of the Chesapeake), where the Comte de Rochambeau on land (aided by the Marquis de La Fayette) and the Comte de Grasse by sea defeated British forces and so secured victory for the American colonists, changing the history of the entire world forever. The United States would not even exist if these victories had not happened. Do Americans really not know this stuff any more?
My irritation is partly because I rather like France, and about which American neo-conservatives are especially absurd. For some reason 'right-wing' people are supposed to abominate France and foreigners in general. I have never really understood this. Since the moment I first set foot in France in 1965 ( via the old 'Golden Arrow' that then still ran between London and Paris, steam-hauled by an enormous black locomotive with a surprisingly effeminate whistle, from Calais to Amiens) I have looked on it as a place from which Britain can learn a great deal about the arts of life.
And there are of course plenty of other French military victories, from Valmy, Jena, Marengo, Friedland, and Austerlitz to the clashes that drove the Austrians out of Italy and the great battles on the Marne which stopped the Germans in 1914. And partly because, just at the moment, I am deep into a book 'That Sweet Enemy', which describes the curious relation between two of the world's longest-enduring nations.
The book, wittily and enjoyably written by an English historian and his French wife (Robert and Isabelle Tombs) has the charm of a lot of oblique history. Seen from a slightly different angle, events which you thought you knew about suddenly look different and often more interesting.
It is as if, after growing used to what you thought was a superb view of an ancient and fascinating city from a northerly hilltop, you one day travelled to the opposite side, and saw it for the first time from the south. It is the same place, but lit up and arranged in a way which makes you realise you had missed half the point before."
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Yazidi 'devil worshippers' massacred in Iraq
It's not like these Yazidi guys have any more respect for women than Muslims, but I've had some sympathy for them since reading this a few months ago:
Massacre fuels northern Iraq tensions
24 April 2007
BBC
... and now there's this:
Iraq bombs: 250 die in worst terror attack
Telegraph
15/08/2007
Al-Qa'eda has been blamed for the deaths of 250 Iraqis in a co-ordinated bomb attack - the worst terrorist atrocity the country has witnessed since the downfall of Saddam Hussein four years ago. Five fuel tankers were driven by suicide bombers into two crowded villages belonging to Kurdish members of the Yazidi religious sect before they were detonated almost simultaneously.
What occurs to me is that since the Yazidi were the victims of suicide bombers, they must have done something truly awful to inspire the oppressed yet brave al-Qaedans to resort to this weapon of the powerless. My suspicion immediately falls on Yazidi foreign policy, and I hereby call on them to change it (whatever it is), and to withdraw from Kashmir and wherever else they are oppressing Muslims. After all, we're all al-Qaeda now.
Massacre fuels northern Iraq tensions
24 April 2007
BBC
... and now there's this:
Iraq bombs: 250 die in worst terror attack
Telegraph
15/08/2007
Al-Qa'eda has been blamed for the deaths of 250 Iraqis in a co-ordinated bomb attack - the worst terrorist atrocity the country has witnessed since the downfall of Saddam Hussein four years ago. Five fuel tankers were driven by suicide bombers into two crowded villages belonging to Kurdish members of the Yazidi religious sect before they were detonated almost simultaneously.
What occurs to me is that since the Yazidi were the victims of suicide bombers, they must have done something truly awful to inspire the oppressed yet brave al-Qaedans to resort to this weapon of the powerless. My suspicion immediately falls on Yazidi foreign policy, and I hereby call on them to change it (whatever it is), and to withdraw from Kashmir and wherever else they are oppressing Muslims. After all, we're all al-Qaeda now.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Michel Houllebecq's "Platform"
Just read Michel Houllebecq's brilliant "Platform". Brilliant on love, sex and the tourist industry, and Islam comes in for the odd swipe, as in this taste:
"The paradise promised by the Prophet," the banker tells Michel, "already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars ... Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system. The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam."
"The paradise promised by the Prophet," the banker tells Michel, "already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars ... Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system. The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam."
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