Suck It Up Degenerates

The ever-salient Ted Dalrymple had an excellent piece in yesterday's WSJ (subscribe already!). He tears into the conventional wisdom that drug addicts are victims and specifically that heroin is easy to become addicted to and almost impossible to get off.

To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit.

The latter part of that quote has been standard orthodoxy on the left for years: addicts can't help it, it is a disease, they only commit crimes in order to feed their habit, they don't WANT to do drugs they have to, on and on.

'Rymple goes on to say that these degenerate addicts have been gaming the system for years:

I have witnessed thousands of addicts withdraw; and, notwithstanding the histrionic displays of suffering, provoked by the presence of someone in a position to prescribe substitute opiates, and which cease when that person is no longer present, I have never had any reason to fear for their safety from the effects of withdrawal. It is well known that addicts present themselves differently according to whether they are speaking to doctors or fellow addicts. In front of doctors, they will emphasize their suffering; but among themselves, they will talk about where to get the best and cheapest heroin.

But why are so many criminals hooked on smack? Aren't they committing crimes to feed their habit? What would make them do these things?

Furthermore, I discovered in the prison in which I worked that 67% of heroin addicts had been imprisoned before they ever took heroin...In other words, whatever caused them to commit crimes in all probability caused them also to take heroin: perhaps an adversarial stance to the world caused by the emotional, spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuity of their lives.

That was pure conservative intellectual gold right there--strong adversarial stance to the world caused by the emotional, spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuity of their lives.

Describes much of the left fairly accurately too, actually--the adversarial nature of their endless adolescent greviances against big business, the suburbs, religion and Normal Americans in general.

But I digress. 'Rymple doesn't see a bright future for his view on dope and criminals being widely accepted, since:

...addicts and therapists have a vested interest in the orthodox view. Addicts want to place the responsibility for their plight elsewhere, and the orthodox view is the very raison d'être of the therapists. Finally, as a society, we are always on the lookout for a category of victims upon whom to expend our virtuous, which is to say conspicuous, compassion. Contrary to the orthodoxy, drug addiction is a matter of morals, which is why threats such as Mao's (who threatened to shoot anyone who couldn't kick junk), and experiences such as religious conversion, are so often effective in "curing" addicts.

Drug addicts are scum. Low-lifes. Losers. The more clear we are on that point, the easier this issue is to deal with. The amazing thing about 'Rymple is the clarity of his reasoning: getting hooked on dope is an individual moral problem, not a medical problem or societal problem that we need to pour money into.

So suck it up degenerates. The excuses are done.