Vice & Versa

Every history of addiction is written by someone looking at it from outside.

This one isn't.

Vice & Versa is a three-hundred-year history of vice, told through the numbers that got the story wrong and the men who made them up.

Jethro Lefevre has spent the better part of twenty years seeing addiction from both sides of the fence pouring drinks behind licensed bars in London and, back home in South Africa, in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, and, in the same stretch of years, sitting on the other side of it as a city councillor and in property, watching what the trade does to a community from the far end of the counter as well as the near one.

Ten of those years he spent failing to stop using the products he was legally selling. He has been clean for a decade. In between, he read every popular account of why people use, and checked every one of them against a source.

Most of them didn't hold up.

Among the historical "facts" this book takes apart are:

• The four hundred thousand gin-addicted Londoners of 1736 counted by nobody, invented by a man who already knew what he wanted them to prove, and used to pass an Act that killed people.
• The five-sentence letter from 1980 that helped start the opioid crisis every word of it true, stripped of one adjective by four-fifths of the six hundred and eight people who cited it.
• The questionnaire, returned by ninety-eight men, that became the disease model of alcoholism.
• Rat Park, the most-shared addiction study on the internet, which does not replicate and the evidence that actually supports its conclusion.
• Rock bottom, and the seven-out-of-ten figure printed on the cover of the book that founded the intervention industry, with no study behind it.

Running alongside the history is his own story, set apart in passages of its own. Twenty-five years using. Sixteen of them in and out of institutions. Ten years clean and no interest in pretending that makes him an expert on anybody else.

Bad numbers in this field are not mistakes lying about being facts. They are instruments.
Somebody is always holding them, and somebody is always on the other end.

This is not a self-help book and it makes no promises. It is the book Jethro wishes someone had handed him - one that tells the truth about the numbers, and doesn't flinch from the parts that are true about him either.