Dr Michael Fitzpatrick argues that drugs are inanimate material; they are not an autonomous malign power over individuals and society.


This line in particular jumped out at me:
"The belief that one is powerless and that one's actions are somehow controlled by forces other than one's own choices is discouraging and demoralising." The quote is from Jeffrey A Schaler's controversial Addiction is a Choice, where he also says, "Many people who oppose the 'war on drugs' say that the 'solution' to the 'problem' is 'treatment'. This is baloney. Addiction treatment is a scam."


Fitzpatrick goes on to cite Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith's Heroin Century, which argues that many heroin users spontaneously give up the drug of their own accord, without benefit of detox, rehab or any other professional intervention. "At least five to 10 percent manage this every year"; the average length of a "serious heroin-using career is about 15 to 20 years...independent of treatment....There is no evidence to date that any form of treatment makes any difference to length of heroin use....People give up when they are ready to do so. Events in their lives are much more important in making this decision than anything that occurs in the clinic."


Of the AA, Fitzpatrick writes,

After the end of Prohibition in the USA in the 1930s, the AA movement combined the evangelical fervour of the Temperance campaign with the modern theory that alcoholism was a disease rather than a moral failing. The first two of the now-famous '12 steps' through which AA guides its adherents to sobriety require that they admit 'powerlessness' over alcohol and submit themselves to 'a Power' greater than themselves (six of the steps refer to the deity).

For my part, I've always been disturbed by the cultlike nature of the AA. He further says the AA model:

"is 'religious and dogmatic', demanding strict adherence to the group policy and not allowing personal choices or individual variations; it 'undermines individual confidence' by insisting on members' weaknesses and predicting the worst outcomes for those who violate group policies; it reinforces the 'addict identity' and discourages people from emerging out of it; it focuses on the addiction and the group itself, ignoring the quality of members' lives outside the group"....The basic premise of AA - that the individual is powerless and should seek to replace the control of one external force (drugs) with another (God, or, in the interim, the group) - can only intensify the loss of autonomy that leads to drug abuse in the first place.

But then again, many people delight in surrendering their autonomy to all kinds of entities, including religion a presumed "ethnic group", and political and quasi-political groups like environmentalism.