The test of a new “treatment” for drug addicts reported in the New England Journal of Medicine seems to assume the answer is yes, but Dalrymple notes the study has a glaring flaw:
As far as I can tell, the control group received no sham injection, so that the members of both the experimental and control groups knew exactly to which group they had been assigned, as did the experimenters assessing the results. In a ‘condition’ (if that is what heroin addiction is) in which psychology plays so large a part, this is no very slight criticism or caveat. It vitiates the whole experiment.
when i was in junior high school in the late 1970’s they suddenly decided that alcoholism was a “disease”. Some of us noted that it was the only disease we’d heard of that you could cure by not engaging in a particular behaviour. It seems like the late 70’s were the beginning of this dishonest narrative where you are supposed to feel sorry for those engaging in self destructive behaviour and pretend they are the victim.