It's reasonable to be skeptical about scientific information in newspaper stories, but I get the feeling that Shafer would question the assertion, "water is wet".

He calls the idea that short acting drugs are more addictive "suspicious nonsense" since there are many short-acting drugs that are not addictive.

Of course, that's an obvious logical fallacy. Nobody is saying that short-actingness alone makes a drug addictive. But given two drugs that give similar pleasurable effects, the one with the shorter duration of action will tend to be the more addictive.

This is well known among MD's and even makes intuitive sense. If drug A gives you a high that slowly tapers off over the course of several hours, and drug B gets you just as high but the effect is lost within a few minutes, you are much more likely to develop symptoms of withdrawal and want to get an immediate second hit of drug B.