Praise from important figures in the field of addiction research and practice

Addiction is still seen as something that happens to people, almost without regard to their own motives or intentions, rather than as a subtle didactic between an external pharmacology and an internal pharmacology which is underlaid ... by such entities as desires, wishes, motives, beliefs and so forth. A number of notable works which do not fit this mold have come to light over the last couple of decades, but the fact that they can be easily recalled (e.g., Heather and Robertson, Peele, Orford, etc.) is an indicant of the relative rarity of these acts of nonconformity.
—John B. Davies, Addiction Research, 5:77, 1997

Stanton Peele is most certainly the most knowledgeable and well written professional on the subject of addictions. His 1974 book Love and Addiction was a breakthrough. People laughed when Stanton said people were just as addicted to cigarettes, love and gambling as they are to drugs: No one laughs at Stanton any more.
—Robert Muscala, Making a new century of chemical health, Chemical Health Concepts, January 2000, p. 1

Peele, S. and Brodsky, A. (1975) Love and Addiction, New York: Taplinger Publishing. This book I read as soon as it was published. A friend had recommended it and she wasn’t wrong. Peele and Brodsky view addiction as a normal behaviour that has veered out of control and they compare it with dysfunctional human relationships. I think it was probably the first book I ever read which analysed addiction in a way that made sense to me and echoed what I knew from my work. Years later, after I came to Stirling, I undertook a study looking at recovered addicts who had been sexually abused as children. One of the researchers we used was a psychotherapist to trade and remarked to me that the relationship they described with their drug(s) of choice sounded exactly like their relationship with their perpetrator. I remembered Peele and Brodsky and pulled it off the shelf. It still reads absolutely true as an understanding of addictive behaviour all these years later.
—Rowdy Yates