Amir’s Reviews > Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy > Status Update

...There is a standard view of heroin addiction that is wrong in almost all its particulars. Heroin hooks no one: it takes effort and determination to reach a stage of addiction... Withdrawal from heroin is not medically serious or even horribly unpleasant... Heroin addiction does not drive people into crime... it would be truer to say that a criminal disposition drives people to heroin.