An article for 'First Things' on the Fantasy of 'Addiction'(and my evening with Chandler Bing)

http://bit.ly/2ktaBCl

Cannabis, Grammar Schools and Skimmed Milk. An Interview with PH

An interview that I gave on Tuesday to The University radio station RAW at Warwick:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NF0Gm3SMM

 

 

 

 

Some thoughts on 'Addiction from a 'neuroscientist'

Readers here will know that I don't think much of 'neuroscience'. Any science is as strong as its weakest component, just as a chain is as strong as its weakest link. This new discipline contains some soft pseudosciences such as 'psychology' and yet has largely supplanted (in the pubic and medical mind) the hard, limited true science of neurology. It also seems to me to have grown up in step with the  new tendency to treat mental illness with pills, rather than through analysis or by long-term confinement in mental hospitals.

 

But I think even less of 'addiction' one of many lazily-accepted concepts in the modern world which are in fact abdications of responsibility for our actions, failures and inactions, dressed up as science ('dyslexia' and 'ADHD', often discussed here, are in the same category).

 

I think in time these ( and other features of modern life) will go the way of 'neurasthenia' and 'brain fever' and other pseudo-medical terms and fancies of the past. So will the 'treatments' given to them, which will become as discredited as lobotomies now are, and as electro-convulsive therapy, and certain drugs discussed here from time to time,  jolly well ought to be.

 

So imagine my mixed feelings when 'The Times' of Monday 25th July publuished extracts from  the neuroscientist Marc Lewis's new book happily entitled: 'The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease'

 

Well, quite, and if it is not a disease, what is it? And why should we accept it as an excuse for our actions?

 

 

 

More Interesting Material on the 'Addiction' Fiction

Don’t take my word for it that ‘addiction’ is a fiction. Please read this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3585351/Addiction-not-brain-disease-disease-personality-psychiatrist-argues.html

Think Dave's won? I bet you believe in flying saucers too!

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

David Cameron is now paying the price for making a promise he thought he wouldn’t have to keep. Sure that he wouldn’t get a majority last May, and genuinely afraid of losing office, he promised a referendum to try to win back votes from Ukip.

It didn’t turn out like that. The cheque he dashed off for a bet he was sure he’d win has now been presented at the bank, and he lacks the money to pay for it.

And so the Prime Minister has been forced into mounting a ridiculous pretence of real negotiations.

David Cameron (pictured in Brussels on Friday) made promises to the electorate in order to win office that he simply cannot keep and has been forced into the ridiculous pretence of real negotiations on Europe

First, he tried to look as if he wanted something he doesn’t want. Now he has to look as if he has won concessions he hasn’t won.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that this is an important change in Britain’s relationship with the EU probably believes in flying saucers as well.

But I can understand how many people will pretend to be convinced, because they are afraid of the alternative.

It was fear of shrivelling into nothingness on the edge of Europe that got us into the European Union and I suspect fear of leaving will keep us there.

Quite how we will be able to keep up a fake debate about the subject till late June, I have no idea.

 

I long ago concluded that I would rather leave, whatever the economic and political cost. I think most of this country’s unique laws and liberty grew up after our break with the Continent under Henry VIII nearly 600 years ago. I think they are worth preserving at practically any cost and, given the chance, I can probably get quite tearful about it.

You cannot expect the Tories to do anything about this. They have never recovered from the day they destroyed us as a great nation by mounting their mad, futile attack on Egypt in 1956.

That was when they decided we couldn’t manage on our own any more, and started whimpering to be let into the then Common Market.

By far the best, wisest and most far-sighted warning against the European project came from Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell in October 1962, not long before his untimely death.

In a speech that still stands up well more than five decades later, he rightly said two things that should be carved in stone in the heart of our capital.

The first was: ‘Of course, the Tories have been indulging in their usual double-talk. When they go to Brussels they show the greatest enthusiasm for political union.

‘When they speak in the House of Commons they are most anxious to aver that there is no commitment whatever to any political union.’

And the second was: ‘We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it.

‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say, “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.’

For much of my life, I have watched his prophecy come true around me. And I have watched a heedless people accept a slow, salami-sliced subjugation they would never have borne if it had been imposed by force of arms.

Do we really, really have the guts to leave now?

A friend of mine who bravely goes to terrifying war zones, but has a lot of common sense even so, is amused by the Western media’s continued belief (encouraged by David Cameron) in ‘moderate’ Muslim groups supposedly fighting against Syria’s President Assad.

My friend asks: ‘If these journalists really believe these people are moderate, why do they not go into the zones they control and report from there?’

And he answers his own question with a wry smile: ‘Because they know perfectly well that within ten minutes of arriving, they’d be trussed up in a car boot and well on their way to the badlands of Syria or Iraq, never to be seen again.’

Even menacing Maria can't shine a light on this mad, bad world

Communist East Germany was so mad and odd that I was always afraid that future generations would refuse to believe the truth about it – such as that its policies on education and women were almost identical to David Cameron’s.

That’s why I thought the Disney company should have bought the whole country and kept it going as a theme park – and as a lasting warning of what human beings can do, given the chance.

Alas, as the disappointing Channel 4 thriller Deutschland 83 has shown, even Germans are forgetting what it was like.

Despite featuring Maria Schrader as the best female villain since Cruella de Vil, the series simply failed to recreate the sheer hopeless, baggy dinginess of the German Democratic Republic – every curtain yellow, every wall and ceiling stained, nothing repainted since about 1942, even the air full of coal dust and rasping fumes.

And without that, it couldn’t really recreate the menace of it, either.

This matters. As we forget it, I begin to see much of it being resurrected all around us.

Even menacing Maria can’t shine a light on this mad, bad world.

Remember we were told that the great Kiev ‘spontaneous’ protests of two years ago were all about ending corruption? Well, corruption in chaotic Ukraine is now so bad that the economy minister, brought in from abroad to combat dishonesty, has just resigned in frustration. The International Monetary Fund is threatening to cut lending unless more is done to fight corruption. Fat chance. Ukraine is corrupt, much as the Atlantic Ocean is wet. The 2014 outbreak was a putsch and its real target Russia. Now it’s gone wrong, coverage in the West has virtually stopped.

Now we’re addicted to stupidity

Can nobody think any more? The word ‘addiction’ is plainly meaningless, as supposed ‘addicts’ so often give up the things they are said to be enslaved by, using willpower.

And it is surely obvious that when someone says he is a ‘gambling addict’, there is no possible chemical or biological explanation for his behaviour. He’s just looking for an excuse for his selfishness and greed. So what ninny decided it was a good use of our money to prescribe such people a pill – Naltrexone – which is normally given to drug abusers and heavy drinkers?

People who do bad things are not ill, and should not be treated.

They are wicked and should be punished.

As I travel home by train on Saturday evenings, my heart often sinks at a major junction when I hear the aggressive shouts of football fans. Imagine my surprise the other day when the shouts turned out to be coming from uniformed police officers, all got up with clubs and baseball caps, who seemed to be nerving themselves up for some sort of combat.

Sunday Morning Live

Some readers may like to see last Sunday's 'Sunday Morning Live', available for a limited time on BBC iplayer, in which I discuss the Paris Atrocities, the campaign for a cultural boycott of Israel , and the fiction of 'addiction'

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06q6tj8

 

Some may not.

 

 

 

 

Don't tell Iain Dale but I've been on the BBC Again

Please don’t tell Iain Dale, the publisher, former Tory parliamentary candidate and broadcaster, who thinks that my occasional guest appearances on the BBC, in which I cannot choose the subject under discussion and can be shut up by the presenter at any time , somehow negate my complaint that the BBC is unsympathetic to my point of view. But I was on two BBC discussion programmes over the weekend.

 

The first was Radio 4’s Any Questions, as it happens my first appearance on this programme for more than two years ( I was rather proud of my last appearance, in April 2013, when I responded to Lord Heseltine’s weary jibe of 'didn’t you used to be a Trotskyite?’ by asking him ‘Didn’t you used to be a conservative?’ Which caused an enjoyable silence).

 

On this occasion I was sitting next to Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary. Also on the panel were Chuka Umunna, the man who might one day be Labour leader, and Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary.   You may be able to work out for yourselves why I was slightly puzzled by the order and shape in which the questions came up. Subjects included bombing Syria, child tax credits, trade union laws and Jeremy Corbyn,

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061tsym

 

Then there was Sunday Morning live, in which we discussed how to help people not to get fat (with a sideswipe at the ‘addiction’ fiction), civil liberty and whether Britain is still a Christian country. There was quite a high number of those silly twitter comments in which people complained that they had found themselves agreeing with the hated Peter Hitchens. That unfamiliar sensation is called ‘Thinking’, guys. Try not to let it happen too often, or you might end up like me.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b063jwgd

 

 

Arguments About Existence and About Causation

Mr Andrew Platt thinks he has found a way of establishing that ‘addiction’ can exist even though its own proponents are abandoning the claim that it is a ‘disease’ and even though there is no objective test for its presence in the human body.

 

His main line of attack has been that there is no objective test for some other things that are generally agreed to exist.

 

One of these is ‘love’.

 

While I’m afraid this is a bit too reminiscent of the linguistic philosophy that nearly drove me to distraction at York in the early 1970s, there’s an interesting point here. But only determined readers should attempt this paper.

 

Mr Platt and I first grappled thus, on the ‘Addiction is not a disease’ thread. The original idea came from Mr ‘Phil W’,  who wrote: ‘Mr Hitchens, 'Addiction' is an internal mental state. It is not possible to prove addiction objectively exists since it is not an object. This doesn't mean that internal states of mind don't exist. You believe in mental illness and you believe in love but you couldn't provide the 'objective proof' for those either. Can you address this simple point that I and other contributors have made?’

 

Mr Platt intervened to say : 'Mr. Hitchens is still reading this thread. What a shame he has not answered Phil W’s excellent point: “You believe in mental illness and you believe in love but you couldn't provide the 'objective proof' for those either.” Of course, he has not answered because he has no answer.'

 

I answered: 'Good heavens, I had no idea anyone seriously expected me to bother with such stuff. I don't 'believe in' mental illness. There's no need to. People behave irrationally, and against their own interests, generally as a result of some sort of physical damage, sleep deprivation, or extreme terror or grief. That is mental illness. The difficulties arise , as I have said here many times, in categorising it, for it takes many forms, and in treating it. Nor do I 'believe in' 'love'. There are many and various experiences and affinities which go by that name, and most of us have experienced them subjectively, though we could not define them objectively. Poets and other artists have attempted to describe aspects of it. But nobody has sought to overturn the entire system of morality and law on the basis of love of any kind. You cannot be excused from responsibility for your actions or from penalties for your crimes, or excused from supporting yourself, or excused from telling the truth, because of love. And if anyone suggested that you could, then we would all be entitled to demand that it should be objectively defined and definable. Fortunately for us and for love, this is not likely.

 

Mr Platt responded :'I thank Mr. Hitchens for his reply, which I was not expecting. Not for the first time, he moves the goalposts. Whether anyone has “sought to overturn the entire system of morality and law on the basis of love” is not relevant. What is relevant is that love exists, yet it is not possible to provide objective proof for it. Mr. Hitchens admits as much. Now we have agreement that certain mental states exist for which there can be no objective proof, how can he continue to use the lack of objective proof for addiction to argue it does not exist? If addiction is a fiction, then so is love. I feel we have been over similar ground before with the coffee argument. For someone who likes to think he knows how to argue this ought to be basic stuff: concentrate first on something we are familiar with (love), establish a principle (it can exist despite lack of objective proof) then apply it to the thing under consideration (addiction). The logic is really not that difficult.'

 

! wrote: No, it isn't. I have not 'moved any goalposts'. This is a useless metaphor in a matter not comparable with football. The word 'exist' means different things in each proposition. The tests of existence in each case are different, and the weight which can be placed upon the things whose existence has been demonstrated is different. 'Addiction', whose existence cannot be demonstrated by any objective test, is even so allowed to influence the objective administration of law and the objective practice of medicine. 'Love' is a word which has many separate meanings and indeed in Greek is described by several different words, is a concept wholly incomparable with 'addiction'. Nor is it used to influence the practice of law or medicine.

 

Mr Platt retorted: 'More obfuscation from Mr. Hitchens! If he does not like the goalpost metaphor then let me spell it out in plain language: please stop bringing things into the discussion which are of no relevance. Neither the Greek language nor medical and legal practices have any bearing whatsoever on the issue. Has he never carried out a thought experiment to test a hypothesis? It seems not! Someone holding a ripe banana might proclaim “all fruit is yellow”. We can test this hypothesis by recalling all the different fruits we have encountered to see if we can think of one that is not yellow. As soon as we think of an orange the hypothesis is discredited; where oranges grow and what they are called in other languages has no bearing on the matter. When someone says “addiction does not exist because it cannot be demonstrated by an objective test” we can do a similar thought experiment to test the hypothesis. We try to recall all the mental states we can think of whose existence is beyond question and ask if there are any that cannot be demonstrated by an objective test. If we can think of any then the hypothesis is discredited. Nothing else is relevant. Phil W (who really should be arguing this, not me) performed such a thought experiment and came up with the good examples of love and mental illness. If Mr. H accepts their existence then his hypothesis is discredited. Note that we have not proven the existence of addiction through this line of reasoning; we have merely removed the objection concerning the lack of objective evidence for it. As far as I know, however, that seems to be the only objection Mr. Hitchens has. I do not wish to get side-tracked by all the spurious information Mr. Hitchens has brought up, but in passing I would note that perhaps love and addiction are not as incomparable as he seems to think. Both can cause unusual behaviour; neither necessarily last forever, but can be overcome; addiction always leads to harmful behaviour and sometimes death, but even love can do that too in certain circumstances.

 

To which I now reply.

 

I am surprised at his curt dismissal of my point about Greek, in so many ways the parent of all modern language. As C.S.Lewis points out in his ‘Four Loves’ Greek has four different expressions which English generally translates as love – Philia, the bond of friendship, Agape, the unconditional love of God, Eros, the non-physical side of sexual love, and Storge, empathy and familial love. 

Each can be fairly clearly defined, in my view. These are all so deeply different that many of us will not have experienced all of them, some will have experienced one or two but not the others and some sad souls may never have experienced any of them. But the point is that the experience necessary to conclude that these exist would be entirely different in each case.

 

In each case, to say that they exist objectively is to make a qualitatively different statement. And the evidence we would require in each case would be different.

 

If that is the case within the single word ‘Love’, then it is even more the case *between* the wholly different words and concepts ‘Addiction’, ‘Love’ and ‘mental illness’.

 

There is a closer congruence between ‘mental illness’ and ‘addiction’ as it is significant in both law and medicine.

 

And one of the very interesting things about ‘mental illness’ is the way in which it can be misused as soon as it strays from the strictest possible definition, that is to say, the objectively observable overthrow of the ill person’s reason.

 

Most of us have called a political opponent or an enemy ‘mad’ at some point or other. Thousands of defence lawyers have tried to claim that their clients are ‘mad’ to save them from prison. Some political regimes have also claimed that their opponents are insane as a way of torturing and incarcerating them, most notably the USSR. In some ways worse, in some ways not, psychiatrists in free countries have subjectively classified as mentally ill, or disordered or otherwise afflicted, persons who in the view of many are perfectly sane, and have then imposed upon them objective and potent biochemical or physical treatments, such as powerful psychotropic drugs, electric shocks or lobotomies. 

 

 

This is why I insist on the most narrow precision when using the term, and think others should too.

 

I simply do not think that ‘love’ needs to be treated with such precision or such caution, as the law does not use it to excuse crimes and the medical profession does not use it as a pretext for prescribing medication or for requiring ‘treatment, let alone invasive brain surgery. The clever-clever but ultimately unconvincing attempts to drag the love of God into the law-making process is a dud. There is obviously not a parallel for the use of the term ‘addiction’ to allow criminal drug abusers to be sent for ‘treatment' rather than punished according to law.  Nor is there a parallel in medicine for the drugs prescribed to ‘treat’ ‘addiction'. No such drugs are prescribed to ‘treat’ love of any kind.

 

If ‘addiction’ is an ‘internal mental state’ then it cannot conceivably be used as a reason for changing our behaviour towards lawbreakers who claim to be influenced by it. If ‘love’ is in fact comparable to ‘addiction’, in the sole sense that that its existence can be claimed without objective proof, then that is the only similarity between the two, either in general usage or in application. 

 

 

DRUGS AND THE RIGBY MURDER 

I have also been challenged by various contributors over my original point about the Lee Rigby murder, that its perpetrators were unhinged and that this is the principal reason for their action.  

 

I should emphasis here that ‘Principal’ does not mean ‘only’. Some have said they cannot find my original posting. These are the two earliest articles which I published in the Mail on Sunday, and which would therefore have been published here too.

 

 

I wrote on  26^th May 2013

 

‘WHEN a soldier was murdered on the streets of London, what use was it to anyone that the Prime Minister flew back from Paris? What use was the fatuous committee, grandiosely called COBRA (SLOW-WORM would be a better name), that gathered portentously in a bunker, as if the Blitz was still on? This is just street theatre - a bunch of powerless people pretending they can protect us from the wholly unpredictable.

What use are the expensive spooks who track, snoop and file, who want the power to lock us up for weeks and to peer even more deeply into our lives? They failed to prevent this, though they knew all about the suspects.

As for the police, living on a reputation they won decades ago and no longer deserve, wouldn't a constable on old-fashioned foot patrol have been more help on this occasion than the squadrons of armed militia who appeared long after the event, blazing away in the street? The police force in this country is now bigger than our shrunken Army, but it is extraordinary how its members are never, ever there, except to protect the powerful. Too busy patrolling Twitter, perhaps.

Now look at the suspects. Oceans of piffle have been written (as usual) about the mythical bogey of 'Al Qaeda'. We are in yet another frenzy about the 'hate preachers' who are the inevitable result of 40 years of state multiculturalism. The English Defence League (even stupider than the liberal elite) is 'defending our way of life' by throwing bottles at the police.

But nobody has seen any significance in the fact that Michael Adebolajo's life changed utterly when, as a teenager, he began taking drugs, especially cannabis. Use of this drug, particularly when young, is closely correlated with irreversible mental illness. That's also when he embraced the barmy version of Islam that seems to have him in its grip.

There are plenty of other young drug users roaming our streets. Most of them couldn't even spell 'Al Qaeda' and won't embrace Islam. But many of them will become mental patients. Some of them, alas, will be 'released into the community' to commit awful acts of unhinged violence that barely make the local TV news.

No Prime Ministers will fly back from Paris. No Whitehall committees will meet. No noble statements of defiance will be made. And yet, if we strengthened and enforced our drug laws, instead of watering them down to nothingness as we have done, much of this would be preventable.’

 

And I wrote on 22^nd December 2013

 

‘BACK in May, I pointed out that at least one of the Woolwich killers had wrecked his brain with cannabis from an early age.

Now we know that both of them had done so.

My point was this - that the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby were among the large number of British criminals sent mad by this terrible drug.

Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale both acted like drugged madmen on the day of the killing. For instance, Cheralee Armstrong said in a statement read in court on December 2 that Adebowale 'looked mad, like he'd escaped from a mental hospital'.

We now know that, for a week before the murder, Adebolajo was living in a house where there was a cannabis farm. Both men were habitual users of cannabis, and had been since their teens. The correlation between the use of this drug and severe, irreversible mental illness is very strong, especially in the young.

Many violent criminals, most of them having nothing to do with politics or Islam, are long-term cannabis users.

The important element in this case is not the religion. It is the dope. Many young men become militant Muslims but never kill. Many young men never embrace any religion, but take to skunk and become mad and violent. What, then should we be worrying about more? Skunk? Or Militant Islam? But cannabis has so many friends and secret users in the political, legal, and media establishment that this crucial connection is repeatedly ignored.

Rather than indulge in secret police fantasies about somehow guarding against 'extremism', we should treat cannabis as the menace it is, and severely punish all those found in possession of it.’

 

 

 

To emphasise one cause of an event or one explanation is not to say that there is no other influence on the event. My point was then, and is now, that to attribute the Rigby killing to some sort of Islamist conspiracy( as much of the media has done) is a ludicrous misunderstanding of a crime mainly attributable to the severe mental illness of the perpetrators. AS for 'total exclusion' Let's try it this way: Was the killer's choice of victim influenced by their Islamic beliefs? Probably. Had they not been Muslims, would they have killed someone else under a different pretext? Almost certainly Had they not been mentally ill, would they have killed anyone at all? Almost certainly not. Therefore their adherence to Islam, while playing a part, was not the central question. How do I reach these conclusions? By adducing several cases of grotesquely violent murders involving obscene mutilations of the victim using knives, including beheadings conducted by persons who were not Muslims but who were insane and who were known drug abusers. I have not been able to find comparable cases in which the killers were Muslims but *not* drug abusers. If anyone wishes to argue against this, I'd be obliged if they'd do so without trying to claim that I'm excusing Islamic fanaticism, or any similar rubbish. It's demonstrably false and I have no such aim. And can someone explain to Mr Owen that to say that a) is the principal cause of something is not to say that b) or c) played no part in it. It is to say that a) was the principal cause. no more, no less. ***

'Addiction is not a Disease' says somebody other than Peter Hitchens

Readers interested in the subject of alleged ‘addiction’ may be interested in this article, from ‘Salon’ magazine  http://bit.ly/1NpGR1X

 

The author of the book it reviews, Marc Lewis, is a psychologist and former 'addict'. The book is called: “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease.”) He comes from the disciplines of  ‘Psychology’ and ‘Neuroscience’, about whose claims to be hard sciences I am highly sceptical. I've no doubt he's pretty sceptical about people like me. And yet, we seem to agree, more or less. 

For what’s really striking about the review article by Laura Miller is this statement: ‘For several decades now, it’s been a commonplace to say that addicts have a disease. However, the very same scientists who once seemed to back up that claim have begun tearing it down.’

 

And also this passage from the book which she quotes : 

'“The brain changes with addiction,” he writes. “But the way it changes has to do with learning and development — not disease.” All significant and repeated experiences change the brain; adaptability and habit are the brain’s secret weapons. The changes wrought by addiction are not, however, permanent, and while they are dangerous, they’re not abnormal.'

I do hope that all those who shouted and yelled at me for doubting the 'disease' theory of addiction during my televised conversation with Matthew Perry, the noted actor, at Christmas 2013, will not now chase after Laura Miller, and the author whose book she is reviewing,  in the same way.

But, if they don’t  (and they shouldn’t) perhaps they should consider whether they were right to be so self-righteous and arrogantly over-confident when they assailed me.

He doesn't Think Putin Did It, Either....

I have argued in private and in public with Roger Boyes, a former East Europe correspondent of the Times of great distinction, on the subject of Russia, the Ukraine and our attitude towards Vladimir Putin. It would be true to say that we disagree on almost every particular.

 

So I think I am entitled to draw readers’ attention to his article on the Nemtsov murder in ‘The Times’ of London  today . I cannot link to it, because it is behind a paywall, nor quote extensively from it, so you must seek it out for yourselves. But I think the ‘Putin must have done it’ faction will not enjoy it.

 

It is a thoughtful article based on Roger’s extensive experience, especially in Poland, and it rings pretty true to me.

 

The crucial; quotation is this ; ‘I don't think he [Putin] killed Boris Nemtsov and I think he has seen in that assassination a hint of his own melancholy future.’

 

I shall have a bit more to say on the Ukraine issue in the next few days.