[1] Lindesmith's interest in drugs began at the University of Chicago, where he was trained in social psychology by Herbert Blumer and Edwin Sutherland, earning his doctorate in 1937.

Once the individual concludes that he or she is hooked, it rarely occurs to them that they are engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy, trapped within a belief that makes the experience exactly what it is feared to be.

The fact that Lindesmith's work threatened the emerging demonization of heroin, etc., is clear from how the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN)—predecessor of the DEA—worked to discredit him.

This is outlined in a paper by Galliher, Keys, and Elsner, "Lindesmith v. Anslinger: An Early Government Victory in the Failed War on Drugs".

[2] As early as 1939, FBN director Harry Anslinger had the Chicago District Supervisor of the Bureau notify Indiana University that one of their professors was a drug addict.

Professor Nils Bejerot argued that Lindesmith made wrong conclusions about what caused the low abuse of opium in the late 1940s in England.

Bejerot – who was very familiar with the discussion about drug policy in the UK and had studied epidemiology and medical statistics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1963 – drew the opposite conclusion.

When the number of addicts of heroin in England doubled every sixteenth months from 1959 to 1968, the British government was forced to implement more restrictive drug laws.

[3][4][5][6] Lindesmith wrote his earlier books from close personal interviews with a very limited number of addicts, about 50, almost all of them victims of therapeutic use of drugs when they were in health care for other reasons.

[5][7] Lindesmith was born in Clinton Falls Township, Steele County, Minnesota, and gained an early fluency in German from his German-born mother.

Lindesmith taught school before entering the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1937, writing his dissertation under the direction of Herbert Blumer.