Fair play to Peter Hitchens

Manach wrote: »

I find Mr. Hitchens both an excellent writer of books and blogs that chronicle the disintegration of Western society into a fractured and impoverished backwater. ..........

Hehehe. Go to rural India, Egypt, the Congo, Guatamala Columbia and the like, get a good idea of "impoverished" and "fractured" and get back to me.

old hippy wrote: »

How does this PC Nanny interfere with family life, specificaly?

I think this may be a hit and run and you're unlikely to get a response. :pac:

Who is more likely to be right here, some conservative ideologue shooting from the hip with a clumsy point to prove around personal freedom or qualified medical professionals trained in addiction management and recovery?

Mammanabammana wrote: »

There seems to be this widespread perception that addiction is a get out clause for anything an addict does under the influence of whatever the substance might be. The substance abuse may explain the behaviour since the person's thinking and behaviour has usually been completely distorted by the substance. However, this shouldn't absolve the offender of any responsibility. If you get drunk and commit a crime, you should still pay the penalty, irrespective of whether you're on a night out and have one too many or whether you're an alcoholic destroyed by drink. Same thing goes for drug addicts or any substance abusers. Being out of your head is not an excuse, and it shouldn't for one second stop you from paying the penalty.

Goes without saying, and I think the law generally agrees with you......that is, unless, you have the good fortune of being from the right post code.

It's a tricky one. On one hand I think that some people have addictive tendencies handed down to them and it is a very complex problem requiring intervention, treatment and sometimes group therapy like AA. On the other if you have continuing evidence that you have a substance abuse problem and it's causing chaos in your life and the life of others you have a responsibility to actively do something to address it. A friend of mine is an alcoholic and for a long time I tried to talk him out of his drinking but he's still the same and nothing changed. You can't save people from addiction they've got to want to do it themselves.

I think if you commit a crime while intoxicated you should have to pay for that crime but I think criminalising the act of taking drugs is wrong in cases where it's a victimless crime.

Hitchens seems to be completely detached from society, living in his own upper middle class Tory bubble. Saying harsher sentencing for drug offences would deter users is a ridiculous argument, does every person caught with drugs need to be stigmatized and their lives ruined? It would cause further damage to people who's only crime is damaging their own bodies.

Robroy36 wrote: »

That dope don't live in the reel worild. :rolleyes:

Some point you're trying to get across there.....?

Robroy36 wrote: »

Tell that to the people who have had their communities and families ripped apart by the drug users and dealers.

The present system is only perpetuating that. Send a drug user to prison and he's surrounded by drugs. Give him a criminal record and he can't get a job. Give him no hope for the future and he thinks **** it might as well get out of my head. And on and on it goes. We need a different approach.

Peter Hitchens isn’t the only person to reject the disease hypothesis of addiction. Gene Heyman makes a great case that current conventional wisdom about addiction, that it is a disease and a compulsion beyond conscious control, is dead wrong. His book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, argues that addiction is actually voluntary, influenced by preferences and goals, and can be understood as a quirk in the psychological principles governing all human decisions. (So it’s more of a mental health issue then.)

The trouble with labeling something like addiction as a disease is that it tends to remove much of the accountability from the addict and promotes the idea that they are somehow a victim at the mercy of their own corrupted neurology.

What this does for many addicts is that whenever they feel the unrelenting compulsion to engage in their addiction, they find absolution in the concept; that making that impulsive choice is because they have a disease and are powerless to counteract it. As you can imagine, this does not help them in taking full accountability for their weakness and assigns responsibility to something else instead.

While people with addictions may very well be victims in the conventional sense, it would seem more appropriate to label them as victims of their own desires, not of some disease in their body or mind. In the same way that Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease are all legitimate diseases and cannot be overcome by willpower and cognitive awareness, addicts are able to give up their addictions.

Many will argue passionately that such addicts who manage to give up their addictions are not proper addicts, or fall into a different class of compulsive user. Certainly, some people do become more addicted than others but this doesn’t mean that choice isn’t playing its part.