Reader CatherineNY draws attention to Kevin Williamson’s NR piece on heroin addiction. Williamson says he has known a few junkies, and it’s just not the case in this day and age that anybody stumbles innocently into heroin addiction. Excerpt:

The model of “rational choice” has taken a beating over the years in the field of economics, and those of us with a broader and less quantitative interest in social questions should take notice. It is hard to develop a rational-choice explanation for junkies unless we consider the very short term, in which case people use heroin for the same reason they use alcohol: They are bored, they are depressed, they are lonely, they cannot sleep, it is a social convention within a certain milieu. And it is associated with a promise, usually unspoken: James Bond’s martini is as much a part of his persona as is his Walther PPK and his Aston Martin. A glass of champagne has a certain meaning, a cigarette has a certain meaning, and so does a syringe full of heroin. Those who contemplate the legalization of such substances (and I am one of them) must do so with clear eyes, neither taken in by the romanticism of heroin nor unable to understand how and why that romanticism operates in the culture, and what that means for the choices that people make. It is not the case that no one plans to become a junkie.

This piece brought to mind something I read in high school. We were all passing around a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which had all kinds of advice for successfully using drugs, none of which we actually used (OK, I did try to get high off of nutmeg, but it only made me sick and made my pee smell like Old Spice for three days). The book was agnostic about using drugs, except for heroin. The author said that any drug that required you to stick a needle in your vein was something you should stay away from, period.

I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. I mean, I don’t understand why people become heroin addicts. Does anybody know anybody whose life is made better, or even bearable, by having to shoot up daily? It’s like that with crack and crystal meth, too. I know people who snorted cocaine (though I didn’t know they were doing it at the time), and managed to live normal lives. Had they not quit the drug, things would have gone much worse for them, and I have one friend who very nearly killed himself on coke, until he quit and found God. My point is, it’s not hard to find people who use powder cocaine and who don’t get insanely addicted to it. That’s obviously not a reason to dabble in snorting coke, but I can see how one could talk oneself into trying it, wondering what it could hurt. Similarly, many people ruin their lives with alcohol, but many more use it without problems.

But heroin? Crack? Crystal meth?

Williamson’s point, I think, is that Hoffman bears a significant degree of moral responsibility for his own stupid, entirely avoidable death. Whatever his inner demons, he didn’t just wake up one day and find himself addicted to heroin, the way many alcoholics come to themselves and find that they can’t live without booze.

A friend e-mails that she enjoyed the piece I posted last night about how much Hoffman loved his kids, but:

I have no patience for the “we lost such a great actor, it is a tragedy” garbage I’m reading everywhere. It is not a tragedy to “lose” an actor, it is a tragedy that those 3 (young) children lost their father. Of course, audiences can be sad that Hoffman is gone. I am too. But I am crazy angry to learn that he so loved and appreciated being a father that he berated a (practical) stranger to join the act and procreate! For such a person to fail to remain sober, even after more than two decades is infuriating. How could he do that to his kids? There seems to be no way for people to express disappointment or even anger toward someone who failed so miserably, even as we try to understand how nearly impossible it is for an addict to abstain from alcohol or drugs.

Come March at the Oscars he will be lionized and eulogized as if his life was taken by someone, or something out of his control. For the sake of his children he should have controlled it and for failing to do so some measure of disappointment and anger should temper our collective praise.

This is true, and important to keep in mind when weighing the meaning of Hoffman’s overdose.

Would giving Philip Seymour Hoffman the right to buy his dope legally would have prevented his death? No, I don’t think that it would have. Consider recovering addict Aaron Sorkin’s observation about his friend’s death:

So it’s in that spirit that I’d like to say this: Phil Hoffman, this kind, decent, magnificent, thunderous actor, who was never outwardly “right” for any role but who completely dominated the real estate upon which every one of his characters walked, did not die from an overdose of heroin — he died from heroin. We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine.

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. He’ll have his well-earned legacy — his Willy Loman that belongs on the same shelf with Lee J. Cobb’s and Dustin Hoffman’s, his Jamie Tyrone, his Truman Capote and his Academy Award. Let’s add to that 10 people who were about to die who won’t now.