For a piece in the Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that the Princess of Wales’s recent claim that addiction is “not a choice or a personal failing” is both empirically false and morally damaging. By denying agency her view reduces addicts to passive objects rather than responsible subjects, stripping them of dignity and the possibility of genuine change:

At the root of the Princess’s misapprehension is the post-religious or secular view that if a person is the author of his own downfall, he is due no sympathy or compassion. It is a highly puritanical view, and since we do not want to be puritans, we make the problem a medical one instead. But since we are all sinners and the authors of our own downfall, at least in some respect or other, this also has the corollary that sympathy or compassion is due to no one when he needs it.