Skip to main content
In the Sept. 15 issue, I was quite pleased to see you give the portly pedophile Goldschmidt no quarter ["Building Clout"]. I then turned the page and was massively displeased to see another silly article about heroin addiction ["Warming Up the Cold Turkey"].
Chris Lydgate's panegyric to buprenorphine needs to be contextualized within the history of other opiate "cures." A hundred years ago, Lilly successfully marketed heroin as a cure for morphine addiction, neglecting to mention that it is 10 times as powerful. Big "mistake," but not for their stockholders. When Nazi docs wanted a superpowerful analgesic for their soldiers to carry, abracadabra, dolophine was born. At the end of the 1,000-Year Reich, Lilly brought this to America as a "cure" for heroin addiction. Oh, and they renamed it methadone.
We now have a lot of methadone addicts, and even more poly-drug abusers lining up for their daily dose and then augmenting it with barbiturates, alcohol and other opiates, including heroin. There are now more methadone-driven overdoses than heroin.
Ask any ex-opiate user who also quit nicotine which was harder to give up. The French Connection II's famous cold-turkey scene notwithstanding, quitting heroin is like a bad flu. Stanton Peele's The Meaning of Addiction argues that junkies learn to get high (unlike hospital patients who get opiates but don't get high) and junkies also learn to suffer excruciatingly when quitting. Peele points out that perhaps a million Vietnam vets returned with massive habits and quit with relative ease. The minority that didn't mostly had extensive antisocial and drug activity before the war.
I quit nicotine cold-turkey with a three-pack-a-day habit. It was not fun at all, but what made it work was a public health climate that said, "This is quite doable." I knew lots of ex-smokers and they were encouraging, and no one tried to get me to light up with them, nor could I bum a cigarette. Luckily, there was no nicotine use/withdrawal culture and industry telling me how hard it is to quit. And I was not in a nicotine-using culture that supported my use and told me horror stories of the last time they tried and failed to quit.
It would be wonderful if buprenorphine is a miracle. It would also be wonderful if the mythology about quitting heroin was put to rest.
Jeremy Szold Ginzberg
Northeast Couch Street
Chris Lydgate responds: I admire Mr. Ginzberg's zest in poo-pooing the misery of others--maybe it's got something to do with all those cigarettes he doesn't smoke. Anyway, I appreciate his useful cautions about historical "cures," but I don't agree that the suffering of heroin withdrawal is a social construction. But what would I know? Tell you what, Jeremy--let's take your message of good cheer down to Hooper Detox and explain to the addicts that their discomfort is all in the mind! And while we're at it, let's ask the street dealers on Burnside to lay off customers who are trying to stay clean. Forget buprenorphine--what these people need is a dose of common sense!
WWeek 2015