https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...
You’re wrong, and the “historical record” you’re citing is actually the same record the NPR piece is summarizing.
What that NPR piece is pointing at is the Lee Robins follow up result that became famous precisely because it violated the folk story of heroin addiction being inevitably chronic. A later review of Robins’ findings summarizes it bluntly:
In Vietnam, high heroin use and dependence. After return, only about 10% tried heroin, and only about 1% became re addicted in the first year.
Now compare that to the VA history page you linked as a “gotcha.” It says the same thing in slightly different numbers:
One year after return, 10% reported opiate use, and 7% reported re addiction.
So no, “not entirely” and “7%” are not a refutation. They are the punchline.
You can argue about whether it is 1% or 7%, depending on definitions and measurement, but the qualitative point survives trivially: it was nowhere near the relapse pattern people expected for heroin addiction, which is why NPR is telling the story in the first place.
Your OUP line about some vets shifting to other drugs is also not the contradiction you think it is. “Some people continued using substances” does not falsify “heroin dependence largely remitted when the environment changed.” Those are different claims. If anything, substitution strengthens the “context and cues matter” thesis, because it implies the Vietnam setting was uniquely good at sustaining heroin use, not that heroin had permanently rewired everyone’s brain.
Also, “VA was unprepared” is about bureaucracy, not epidemiology. The VA being behind the curve tells you the system wasn’t ready for the volume of cases showing up at the door, not that “everyone stayed addicted forever.”
If you want to be precise, the correct statement is:
Most soldiers who were using heroin in Vietnam did not remain heroin addicted after returning home, and relapse was low relative to expectations, which is exactly why this became a canonical example in the first place.
