Portrait of an Addict
Portrait of an Addict
To the Editor:
R. S. Baker is himself guilty of stereotyping the addict [“People Get Hooked,” March] or at least of grievous underestimation of the psychopathology that leads to narcotics addiction. Janet turns out to be the lovable, albeit crazy, mixed-up girl next door . . . “who has been drawn into an encounter with narcotics” . . . and whose tragedy would have been averted in another decade. It is not the drug, but the impulse to use it which makes an addict of a given individual. If drugs are not available, other roads to Lethe are found. Certainly, addicts differ, but to dismiss what they have in common is to throw out the scientific baby with the bathwater. Otherwise, a most interesting article.
(Dr.) Eugene H. Kaplan
Great Neck, New York
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Mr. Baker writes:
I find it difficult to quarrel with Dr. Kaplan, because he seems to stress many of the same points I thought I was making in “People Get Hooked.” However, I did not mean to imply that Janet Clark’s “tragedy would have been averted in another decade,” but merely that it might have taken a form other than narcotics addiction and that the choice of forms would probably differ from those available to, say, a male raised in a Negro ghetto. I had hoped thereby to dispel some of the horrendous mythology that surrounds the topic and causes such things as the unreasoning resistance to the really splendid accomplishments of the Synanon groups in Santa Monica and elsewhere. (The Synanon people, incidentally, have provided dramatic proof that removing the addict from drugs is but a preliminary to the real work of healing the underlying psychopathology.)
I would hope that with the recent end of the Anslinger regime Dr. Kaplan might set out to persuade his fellow physicians to assume their proper humane and scientific role in working with this group of sick people.
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