Interview with Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple came to Amsterdam to promote the Dutch translation of his book Romancing Opiates, Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. Among other activities, he was interviewed by Dutch journalist Martin Sommer at a well-known convention hall on November 12, 2006. Attesting to Dalrymple's popularity, attendance was so abundant that some people were left standing in the wings.

Dalrymple, whose real name is Anthony Daniels, is a flamboyant British writer on various social issues, drawing heavily on literary, historical, and philosophical sources. He has lived in and written about Africa, South America, and communist countries, among others. Now retired and residing in France, he wrote the book named above drawing on his fifteen years’ experience as a psychiatrist in a South Birmingham (England) general hospital and the neighboring prison.

Poverty, Dalrymple poses, is not the cause of inner-city discontent. The profoundly poor people of Tanzania he knew had good manners and were not at all aggressive. Contrarily, many of the Brits who behave badly are not poor. An example are the middle-class men who attend sporting events. At a match in Italy which Dalrymple attended as a correspondent, he asked the Brit sitting next to him, “Why did you come all this way to scream abuse at the Italians?” The answer he received was, “You have to let your hair down.”

Dalrymple sees this attitude as a backlash to the British tradition of stiff upper lip. Under the influence of Freud and others, people have the idea that something terrible will happen to them if they suppress their emotions, as though an unexpressed thought will turn into septicemia. Illustrative is the murderer’s excuse, “I had to kill her doctor, or I don’t know what I would have done.”

Opium addiction, Dalrymple asserts, has been romanticized. In fact the withdrawal symptoms described by authors as De Quincy and more recently the movie Trainspotting are more representative of alcohol and even benzodiazepines than opiates. Drama is enlisted to persuade the public and others of the irresistibility of heroin, and the addict's supposed lack of responsibility for his actions. Likewise, prisoners hoping to squeeze a prescription for benzodiazepines out of the prison doctor behave totally differently after they enter his office than in the waiting area. They are essentially lying, putting on a con act. When Dalrymple stands up to them and refuses to prescribe benzodiazepines, they often turn into lambs, and even apologize for their behavior.

The American system of giving people money to stop taking drugs may work, Dalrymple posits, but it is not treatment. If you pay burglars to stop burgling, they will stop. That is not treatment, it is bribery.

In Britain, drug use is not controlled very well. This is emblematic for society as a whole. The Left has created a sense of entitlement. It has changed from posing that there’s something to which to aspire, into posing that everything’s permissible.

The idea of behavior as a disease also surfaces in the case of battered women. “He gets that look in his eye,” they explain, as though the men who abuse them suffer attacks of quasi-epilepsy. When Dalrymple asks them whether their husbands would batter them in front of him, the women realize that these men can indeed control their behavior.

The real problem these people have is not addiction or disease, but that they don’t know how to live well. Of course, Dalrymple adds, it’s possible to do so much damage to your life, that at a certain point it becomes unlikely that it will be possible to reverse it.

He sums up what the addiction-treatment industry is about with the witticism, “We pretend to be ill, and they pretend to cure us,” a paraphrase of the joke in the former Soviet Union, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” He advocates closing all addiction treatment clinics, which he sees as the modern bureaucratic institutionalization of Romantic (sic) ideas. In his book he further states about heroin addiction and treatment for it:

The primrose path to perdition never ceases to attract;
[I]t is truer to say that the addict hooks heroin than that heroin hooks the addict;
[An opium antagonist as treatment for addiction] turns a trivial medical condition … into a potentially fatal one;
The latest science is not necessarily the best science;
[T]he life of a drug-addicted criminal is actually quite busy … the addict has to work quite hard not to go to work;
Most people who die with methadone in their blood have also taken alcohol or, more especially, benzodiazepines … [this combination's] lethality, which has long been evident, has failed to deter doctors from prescribing it;
The public is to be misinformed if the [addiction treatment] profession is to flourish;
[I]t is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including – or especially – the experts;
Nothing frightens such a worker more than an addict who thinks on his own initiative and decides to give up drugs and drug workers alike.

Dalrymple displays a healthy skepticism of government, stating in his book:

In a modern bureaucratic society … few are the social problems that cannot be turned to professional or personal advantage;
[W]here bureaucracies are concerned, nothing succeeds like failure;
The bureaucratic solution to waste is always more waste;
[I]llusions are a precondition of the bureaucracy’s growth and continued existence;
Harm reduction as a policy is inherently infantilizing of the population: it assumes that the authorities are, and ought to be, responsible, for the ill-consequences of what people insist upon doing;
The hundreds of young prisoners whom I saw who took heroin were perfectly well aware before they ever took it of the connection between criminality and heroin. Far from deterring them, it was of the things that attracted them to the drug in the first place.

When the interviewer asked him why he was the first to have these ideas, Dalrymple stated that he wasn’t, Szasz was. But, he added, he does not agree with Szasz on everything.

Indeed, Dalrymple seems to clearly see the writing on the wall, but fails to reach its inescapable conclusion. Unlike Szasz, he supports drug prohibition. He likens it to the taxation of alcoholic beverages, which he endorses as according to him, it discourages their consumption. What was that about the infantilizing of the population by assuming that the authorities are, and ought to be, responsible, for the ill-consequences of what people insist upon doing? Inexplicably, in spite of his excellent arguments against government regulation of private lives, Dalrymple comes down on the side of regulation. Though exceedingly charming, he lacks Szasz’s consistency of thought.

After his interview, Dalrymple patiently faced a long line of people who wished to ask him questions personally, probably the same question over and over, and more irritatingly, asked him to autograph books, although he never for a moment displayed annoyance.

When the MeTZelf representative’s turn in line came, she asked him, “If taxation works in reducing the consumption of alcohol, and allowing benzodiazepines to be purchased by physician’s prescription only doesn’t, wouldn’t it be a good idea to allow the sale of benzodiazepines, like alcohol, without prescription, and heavily tax it instead?” Judging by his expression, this idea took Dalrymple by surprise. “Maybe it would,” he responded courteously, though it wouldn’t be fair to pin him down on that. He came to the interview prepared to explain why he opposes abolition of drug prohibition, but not why he opposes abolition of prescription drug laws, so was unexpectedly confronted with the flaw of logic in his position.