Heroin, contra the standard view

Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute wrote an article "Poppycock" published on May 25 for the Wall Street Journal. He raises significant questions regarding the standard view of heroin as a highly addictive, crime-causing, "hard" drug (relative to say, marijuana). I encourage you to read the entire article (it isn't that long), but here are a few highlights:

• It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction.
• It is quite untrue that withdrawal from heroin or other opiates is a serious business, so serious that it would justify or at least mitigate the commission of crimes such as mugging.
• 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.
• Insofar as there is a causative relation between criminality and opiate addiction, it is more likely that a criminal tendency causes addiction than that addiction causes criminality.
• It is not true either that addicts cannot give up without the help of an apparatus of medical and paramedical care.

On this last point I got a good chuckle from what the author goes on to say: "Thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam, where they had addicted themselves to heroin, gave up on their return home without any assistance whatsoever. And in China, millions of Chinese addicts gave up with only minimal help: Mao Tse-Tung's credible offer to shoot them if they did not. There is thus no question that Mao was the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history."