If you'd asked me when I started doing with this research, what causes heroin addiction?

I would have said, well dummy, the clue's in the name, right?

Obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction.

That's Johann Hari, a British journalist who traveled some 30,000 miles to answer

this deceptively simple question. I would have thought if we had randomly snatched 20 non-addictive

people off the streets of San Francisco and like a

villain in a saw movie we injected them all with heroin every day for a month at the

end of that month they'd all be heroin addicts and indeed I thought that's

what addiction is it's the desperate physical craving for the drug.

If you give 20 injections you'll get 20 addicts. Case closed.

That is, until Johann encountered a group of people who had in fact been pulled off the street

and injected with the drug as potent as heroin, and their

story blew everything he thought he knew about addiction wide open.

In Britain, where I'm from, as you can tell from my weird downtown Abbey accent, If you step out into the street and you get

hit by a truck, you'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given a lot of a drug called

diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin, right? It's much better than the contaminated shit you'd buy here on the street

because it's medically pure heroin so if anyone listening to this has a British

grandmother who's had a hip replacement operation your grandmother has taken a lot

harrowing quite

likely. If what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or

entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should be happening to all these

people in hospitals in Britain? They should be happening to all these people in hospitals in Britain?

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