Word: habit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Until a few years ago, Alice's habit of accepting rides from strangers would have been the rapists' strongest defense. Since rape trials often hinge on the victim's word against the defendant's, a standard defense tactic has long been to make the woman appear to have been seeking sex. Courts allowed this, generally following the admonitory dictum on rape laid down in the 17th century by the English jurist Sir Matthew Hale: "An accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never...
...trial, says Susan Rohr, an adviser at the three-year-old Detroit Rape Counseling Center, "the defense attorney would have done everything to keep the jury from thinking about the facts of the crime. Instead, he would have tried to make it seem that the victim was in the habit of making quick acquaintances with strange men in a bar late at night...
Still, drug therapy has been essentially a holding action to stabilize the troubled. Tranquilizers such as Valium and Librium are good at reducing anxiety and tension, but they may interfere with thinking and can become habit-forming. The antidepressants, called tricyclics, are increasingly effective, but also can have adverse side effects. The stronger antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine are useful for handling schizophrenics, whose behavior is characterized by hallucinations and severely disordered thinking, as well as other forms of severe mental disorder. But while these chemicals produce a rapid return to normal, or at least socially acceptable behavior, in some patients...
...turkey, the agony of withdrawal is severe. If scientists can create nonaddictive chemicals that bind, like the opiates-and work at Yale with clonidine suggests that they can-to the appropriate receptors, they may be able to ease pain of all kinds, including that connected with stopping a heroin habit...
NONFICTION: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman ∙ Albert Camus, Herbert R. Lottman American Caesar, William Manchester ∙ American Singers, Whitney Balliett ∙ In Memory Yet Green, Isaac Asimov ∙ Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald Thoughts in a Dry Season, Gerald Brenan