This week I will be mainly reading (Alliance book club)

[mcdermott]

On Wednesday I will be picking up my copy of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy by Theodore Dalrymple. I have been wanting to read this for a while. I don't know what to expect really. Of course I don't agree with his stand on things but it should be an entertaining and provocative read.

I think Dalrymple is both entertaining and provocative. And though I think he's dead wrong about a lot of stuff, I think he represents a genuinely compassionate conservativism -- one who is genuinely engaged by the problems faced by the underclass, and who sees a liberal elite as being responsible for robbing them of the intellectual and cultural standards that, in the past, dragged many, many thousands of people out of their class background and enabled them to create a better life for themselves and their communities.

In many ways, its a variant of the argument that welfare (both in the US and in this country) has made it uneconomic for certain people to work, and so you get several generations growing up in families that have never had a job and so their expectations of change are virtually impossible. Although Reagan started this process of Welfare Reform in motion, Clinton, a Democrat, continued it -- and by doing so, managed to get enormous numbers of people off the welfare rolls and back into full-time work. It was Clinton's success in this area that has inspired our government to come up with the recent green paper that attempts to do the same sort of thing in a British context.

There's much in Dalrymple's book that you'll have to agree with. The idea of a fat bureaucracy, whoring off the underclass. With a vested interest in avoiding change, because if they were *too* successful, they'd all be out of a job. Unfortunately, he makes many of the same errors that the rest of the anti-methadone lobby makes. Selective use of the data. Selective focus on targets. Fetishizes one type of success while ignoring other measures of success.

So large tracts of his writing are just boneheaded dumb. Other bits, you'll have read before in people like Szasz, or Marek Kohn or Berridge and Edwards or the American historians like Courtwright etc. But I still enjoy his writing, and think him well-intentioned and sincere. More than that, actually. I think he's got a degree of humility and a sense of humour that I just don't detect in the other neo-abstentionists. So while someone like Kathy Gyngell sickens me, I've got a soft spot for Dalrymple that he may not deserve.

He writes for a US think tank called the Manhattan Institute, which, although its a conservative think tank, is undoubtedly much, much smarter and much more engaged than the rest. He shares a platform there with John McWhorter, who I also think is very good, though unlike Dalrymple, McWhorter is a legalizer. The journal that they produce, City Journal, is always an interesting read -- even if you disagree with it.

[will-c]

I loved marek khons Narcomania, alot of good boroughs qoutes in it, when refuting addiction as a disease...

[penny]

I've always thought the title Paceless, Graceless and Tasteless would be a good one, if I ever produced an autobiography (probably audio book!)

I think it comes from a review of a Norman Mailer novel.

P

[mcdermott]

The Corner: A Year in the life of an Inner City Neighborhood by David Simon and Edward Burns is a great read, with real heart; as is Land of Opportunity: One Family's Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack by William M Adler.

I loved The Corner. I love all David Simon's work, from Homicide: Life on the Streets (both the book and the TV show), The Corner (again, the book and the HBO dramatization.) 

But The Wire is best of the lot, IMO. I agree with Charlie Brooker when he says 'this is the best TV show ever produced.  In fact, I've got a piece in the forthcoming International Druglink that says as much.

I'll keep an eye out for the Adler. I've never heard of it before.

[will-c]

I am so predictable, wanted to pick another book up to start but then settled on another Dennis lehane Novel, think I am falling for Angela Genarro. I am almost amazed when I develop a book crush...

[willow]

i recently read The Kite Runner -  what a brilliant, moving book. it gave a picture of Afganhistan as  completely different to the bombed out war zone we see on the news. the writing about human relationships were very moving. i would really recommend it if you like a good story.

[will-c]

I just posted a response to find I had sent it into the wrong thread...doooh

The Kite Runner, I bought the DVD from a charity shop the other day for £2.00, for my brothers wife as she thinks its one of the best books she has read in years.

I am loving the Dennis Lehane book I am reading at present 'Darkness take my hand' I am sure its giving me weird dreams...

[Mark Gilman]

a liberal elite as being responsible for robbing them of the intellectual and cultural standards that, in the past, dragged many, many thousands of people out of their class background and enabled them to create a better life for themselves and their communities.

I think this is where Dalrymple gets much of his support from. Its the infantilism that one sees applied to adults in caring services that gives Theodore Dalrymple much of his ammo. You see it in drug services all the time. Try and suggest to a drug workers conference that the best thing that someone could do to progress their recovery is get a job.

[will-c]

I personally think employment is better than therapy

[Mark Gilman]

Hallelujah! A kindred spirit!! IMHO, Employment is THE best therapy.

[mcdermott]

Yeah, at the risk of being accused of drugs worker bashing -- yet again, sometimes I'm at a complete loss to understand where drugs workers get their boneheaded ideas from.

At the last Drugscope conference that I attended, I got into an argument with a drugs worker about supervised consumption. Now, whether you like or you don't like supervised consumption, it's an unarguable fact that other countries -- none of whom have the kind of liberal take-home policies that we have here in the UK -- just don't have the incidence of drug related deaths in which methadone is implicated. (Though as America switches from Oxycontin to Methadone for the treatment of chronic severe pain, they're starting to see the levels increase as well.)

But this guy just wouldn't have any of it. According to him, there's no relationship between the introduction of supervised consumption and the four-fold reduction in methadone-implicated drug-related deaths.

And I listen to people like him (and his equivalents on the right of the field like Neil McKegany) and think, shit, these people only see the data that supports their case and completely ignore anything that disconfirms their hypothesis. They listen to the testimony of those who support their point of view, and utterly disregard the experiences of the hundreds of thousands who have the exact opposite experience.

This kind of boneheaded stupidity kills us. It's killed us in the past. God forbid that it should continue to keep on killing us in the future.

[will-c]

What you described Mcd,  is a bit like a guy I knew in rehab years ago, he was in for bulemia and compulsive eating and by far he wasnt the biggest or smallest over eater I have ever met. Anyway, this guy couldnt see past his hands which were kind of daint and girlie, he just couldnt see how big he was because all he ever concentrated on, was how slim his hands looked....

There was good book I read years ago called Toxic Psychiatry, maybe we need a book on Toxic attitudes towards treatment to expose the myths and bandwagon that goes on...

[will-c]

tackling a james l burke novel, its going much more slower than I would have hoped. oddly the main character is like a cross between harry bosch from m.connelly and mat skudder from . l.block...

[mcdermott]

Burke's novels *are* much slower than other crime writers. I think it's because they're set in Louisiana, and the heat there means everyone does stuff more slowly. Though they open slow and build slow, the reward is definitely worth the wait.

A Xmas care package arrived this morning from Amazon, to ensure I'm not doing without over the holiday.

Postie brought the latest Grisham, the latest Wambaugh -- both of whom you'll know. But he also brought the latest James Swain, who you probably won't.

This one -- Midnight Rambler -- is a new departure for Swain. New hero. His previous protagonist was a guy who had worked as an investigator for the Casino Regulatory Body in Atlantic City, who has now gone out on his own. His real strength is in catching cheaters and con-men.

The title of his first book in the series is Grift Sense and I cant recommend them highly enough. They aren't Division One  crime fic. He's no James Ellroy -- more of an Elmore Leonard wannabee. But for a wannabee, he's good enough for me.

Gambling nonfiction is something else I've got a profound and abiding interest in -- and have had since reading Al Alvarez's book, 'The Biggest Game in Town', back when it first came out. One of the best examples I've read recenly is Michael Konic's The Smart Money. This is an account of a couple of years working for a professional gamber, and the length that he has to go to in order to persuade bookmakers to take his bets.

The book makes it very clear that bookies, like casinos, only want to allow suckers and losing players to gamble wth them. If you're smart enough to be able to beat the game -- even legally, within the rules -- by only betting when you believe that you have the edge, rather than the bookmaker, almost all of the bookies/casinos will either ban you, refuse to pay you, put huge restrictions on your bets, move he odds to eradicate your edge.

The gamblers, on the other hand, engage in something like the Nuclear Arms race in an attempt to beat them.

Konik has a couple of other books out -- both collections of his very fine journalism. I own and like both of these books a lot, but neither is a patch on The Smart Money.

[will-c]

Your right, I havent heard of James Swain, The midnight rambler sounds like an interesting read. Isnt the title the name of a famous song.

I started a Val Mcdermit book at weekend to run paralell with the Burke book. I really like the wire in the blood series and wanted to see how descriptive Tony Hills dyspraxia came across in writing.