“There is one other romantic attraction of opiates: and that is to the antinomian turn of mind. This turn of mind has become much more common with the general rise of self-importance, which is a corollary of democracy: and in an age of celebrity, everyone feels obliged to leave his mark on the world, or …
Which Is Where We Get Stoned Goobers
“Romantic claptrap invests intoxication by opiates with a philosophical significance beyond mere self-indulgence . . . It elevates feeling and intuition above knowledge and thought in the pantheon of human desiderata. It invests the personal pettiness of addiction with the aura of titanic and tormenting struggles against mighty forces, while at the same time implying …
Romantic Claptrap
“In modern society the main cause of drug addiction, apart from the fact that many people have nothing to live for, is a literary tradition of romantic claptrap, started by Coleridge and DiQuincey, and continued without serious interruption ever since” (Dalrymple, Romancing Opiates, p. 61).
Why Addiction Isn’t Really
“In other words, the establishment of an addiction requires a certain discipline or determination. It is not something that creeps up on your unnoticed or unannounced or all unawares. As a moment’s reflection would suggest to anyone not blinded by self-interest, this fact has important and profound implications for the very concept of treatment, which …
The Chicken and Egg
“A man who says that he is easily led . . . never uses this characteristic to explain his good deeds, good characteristics, or positive achievements. A man never claims to have been easily led to higher mathematics, the subjunctives of foreign languages, or unpaid work among the poor. People are influenced by the people …
Son of a Gun. Whattaya Know?
“Unfortunately, it is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including—or especially—the experts. Every problem in contemporary society calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy. The ostensible purpose of the bureaucracy is to solve that problem. But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct and …
Addiction Is Behavior
“But medical consequences, however terrible, do not make a disease. Many mountaineers break their legs or get frostbite, but mountaineering is not a disease . . . to conceive of opiate addiction as a disease seems, after my experience with thousands of drug addicts, to me to miss the fundamental point about it: that it …
And It Would Be Hard to Find Anything Less Original
“In Europe as well as in North America, art no longer creates beauty but is meant to shock. Horror, violence, sexual behavior of all kinds, and even bowel and bladder functions are presented on stage and screen and hailed by critics as brilliant and original” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 240-241).
But Then It Didn’t
“A variant that was not sent down from the top was ‘the revolution of the sixties,’ a sort of Rousseauist hope that by destroying the ‘hypocrisy’ of petty bourgeois, Christian-tinged morality and conventions, a new ‘Age of Aquarius’ would drop down out of somewhere” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 229).
Anything Goes But That
“The most eminent American universities have become centers where sexual license and depravity are praised and the only conduct that meets with official rebuke is open disapproval of immorality” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 207).