Already Philip Seymour Hoffman’s fatal heroin overdose has led to arrests of people cops suspect of having supplied him with his drugs.
This quick action alone sets the case of the Oscar-winning actor apart from those of ordinary individuals who find themselves on the wrong side of a needle.
But the ongoing interest in the 46-year-old Hoffman’s death has also focused public attention on the growing phenomenon of heroin — once exclusively an inner-city drug — as the narcotic of choice among white, middle-class people.
Which raises the most disturbing part of these stories: the portrayal of the wealthy and successful Hoffman as suffering from the “illness” of drug addiction, while the issue of personal responsibility is ignored.
Theodore Dalrymple is a retired British prison doctor and author of the book “Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy.” In the London Daily Mail, he writes that these addicts are too widely portrayed as victims of something that is too often treated as a purely medical issue.
And treating it medically — with methadone, say — allows the user to continue his drug intake while placing the blame elsewhere for his addiction.
For whatever reason, Hoffman, like so many celebrities before him, felt he needed drugs as part of his daily existence. But they weren’t forced on him — he made the conscious choice to use them. He likewise made the choice to resume use after two decades of sobriety.
Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” said this about his friend: “He didn’t die because he was partying too hard or because he was depressed — he died because he was an addict on a day of the week with a y in it.”
None of this makes his untimely and unnecessary death any less tragic. In addition to his own life, a woman is now without the man she loved and their children are fatherless.
The truth is that someone who makes the choice to use heroin can only be cured when he makes the choice to stop doing so. And those of us who have experienced a loved one on a destructive path because of drugs know it is false compassion to pretend otherwise.