In April 2006, Roger Kimball’s Encounter Books published Theodore Dalrymple’s Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, and one month later the Manhattan Institute hosted Dalrymple at the Harvard Club to mark the release of the book. In his speech at the event, Dalrymple highlighted the book’s major arguments and described the popular view of opiate addiction as an “emblematic example of how error may become ingrained and how the most obvious facts may be ignored and their significance overlooked entirely”.

We’ve posted the speech in six parts on the SkepticalDoctor channel on YouTube. Don’t miss the last part in which Dalrymple fields a question from Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, which describes itself as “the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.” Dalrymple had criticized Nadelmann’s views nine years earlier in his City Journal essay Don’t Legalize Drugs, and apparently Nadelmann came loaded for bear.

This June in London, Theodore Dalrymple will participate in a debate on the motion: “Psychotherapy has done more harm than good”. Unfortunately for those interested in attending, the event is already sold out. The debate is part of the increasingly-popular Intelligence Squared series, which are sponsored in the UK by The Spectator magazine.

As you might expect of a man at odds with much of his profession (one of his professions, anyway), Dalrymple is arguing for the motion.

Details of the event are here.

On June 2, 2005, Theodore Dalrymple spoke at the Harvard Club in New York to celebrate the release of Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, published by Ivan R. Dee. The book is a collection of essays Dalrymple wrote for City Journal magazine, which sponsored the event. He was introduced by City Journal editor-in-chief Myron Magnet. The speech is in five parts, all of which are available via the SkepticalDoctor channel on YouTube. Part 1 is below.

In the speech, Dalrymple discusses the tendency of intellectuals to “ignore the obvious”, because they are enthralled by a theory and don’t feel the need to observe and contemplate the real world.

Education of a certain kind can actually impede, rather than enhance, understanding of the world. It is not to be thought that all education is good and leads either to enlightenment or realism.

We have posted on YouTube a speech that Theodore Dalrymple delivered at the Harvard Club in New York on November 14, 2001 to mark the release of Life at the Bottom. The speech is in five parts. Part 1 is below. Look for the others here. We have also created a SkepticalDoctor channel at YouTube to collect videos related to the good doctor.

The event at the Harvard Club was hosted by the Manhattan Institute, publisher of City Journal, the magazine that published the essays that were collected in the book. City Journal editor Myron Magnet provided the introduction, the first few seconds of which are unfortunately cutoff in the video (and I can’t seem to fix it). Missing from his introduction is the following:

Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to see you all here. Welcome.

Gathering blurbs for Life at the Bottom was an extraordinarily pleasant experience. People couldn’t say yes enthusiastically or quickly enough. It was as if they had been waiting by the phone just to be asked. And because we approached some of the nation’s foremost thinkers, the blurbs that came back with such lightning speed were marvels of intelligence, each one a pithy epigram going straight to the heart of the book’s accomplishment.