Stanton Peele Says Philip Seymour Hoffman Was Taught To Be Helpless Before Drugs

Philip Seymour Hoffman is not a good symbol for
the efficacy of American treatment. He was famously abstinent after
having entered rehab at 22.  Then, supposedly abstinent for 23
years, he took some pain medications and went completely haywire,
progressing to rampant heroin use.  According to this model, a
person who is addicted to heroin who simply samples a painkiller is
doomed to all-out relapse by this “cunning, baffling and powerful
disease.”

But what are we to make of the stunning, continuing findings
over the decades that most people recover from heroin and other
drug addictions? Corralled by the disease theory in rehab in his
early 20s, writes Stanton Peele, Philip Seymour Hoffman failed to
allow himself to mature out, to develop a realistic assessment of
his own strength relative to pharmaceuticals and other drugs. As a
result he was left vulnerable, not to a cunning, baffling and
powerful substance, or disease, but to an emptiness and learned
powerlessness, or helplessness.

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