HOW MY ORGAN OF ADDICTION JUST WITHERED AWAY ONE DAY

The mystery of addiction is as deep and as dark as the human psyche.
This occurred to me in the House the other day as some frontbench
spokesman was talking contentedly about the need to get drug addicts
out of the hands of dealers into the hands of health
professionals.

Health professionals don't, as far as I know, have much of a record on
drug addiction. Nor do they act as quite the magnet to drug addicts in
the way that dealers do. Addiction finds expression, recognition even,
in squalor, misery, death by vomit. Perhaps the submission to the
damage, the danger, the destruction, perhaps that's the point. The
addict is communicating with him or herself in a way that nothing else
can reach.

But addiction varies so much it's hard to professionalise its
treatment.

I started smoking cigarettes at about the age of 15 and piled it on
over the next quarter century. Even had I seen the floor-to-ceiling
sitting room full of cartons I was to get through I wouldn't have
thought twice about starting.

Simon Carr