Which Comes First: The Addiction or the Criminal?

Theodore Dalrymple looks at crime and addiction and reverses the usual assumption.

An excerpt:

The criminal records of most addicts who end up in prison are extensive before they ever took up heroin — indeed, a few of them claim to have first taken heroin in prison. In the 1950s, it was found that at least three quarters of the still very small number of heroin addicts in Britain (the numbers of such addicts having increased by between 2,500 and 6,000 times since then to between 150,000 and 300,000) had criminal records before they ever took heroin.

In other words, in so far as there is a causative connection between addiction and criminality, it is that criminality — or whatever predisposes people to it — causes addiction and not addiction that causes criminality.