ABSTRACT
For many years addiction has been considered a disease of modern western society. In 1964 when the World Health Organisation recommended recognising drug addiction as an illness, it referred explicitly to the physical diseases which result from drug addiction. In the years since this recommendation, drug addiction has come to be regarded as a form of mental illness in some European countries. What is surprising is that this has happened not as a result of scientific research, but as a result of theorisation and mystification. In Germany in the late 1990s, for example, there is still no professorship and consequently no discrete university research unit concerned with addiction. Nevertheless addiction therapy in Germany – as in many other countries – is carried out professionally. Residential treatment centres are publicly financed only when the director is a medical doctor and the centre is staffed by professionals such as doctors, psychologists and social workers. These professionals frequently base their therapeutic work on the hypotheses or even myths of therapeutic theories, but use therapeutic instruments which don’t necessarily comply with these theories (Groterath 1993: 250-2). One can find similar examples of this non-rational approach to addiction treatment elsewhere in Europe, such as the presence of gurus or so-called ‘charismatic’ leaders in some treatment centres in France and Italy, which surprisingly meets with the approval of health administrators.
