Defining Addiction

The Meaning of Addiction - An Unconventional View

Stanton Peele

The Meaning of Addiction presents an entire non-reductive, experiential model of addiction. It became a major nondisease text, including use at Harvard. Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog (who surrendered her medical license in a case involving the suicide of a patient who had in his possession sado-masochistic sexual fantasies Bean-Bayog had written) said the book "worried" her in a review in the New England Journal of Medicine and asked for people who felt the same way to contact her.

Addiction Is a Choice

Jeffrey A. Schaler

Jeff Schaler takes a libertarian view of addiction — drug use of even the most compulsive variety is voluntary behavior.  This view misses much about addiction, and risks being dismissed as both irrelevant and insensitive. Nonetheless, although it pushes them too far, this book contains the important ideas that addictive behavior is value driven, that addiction expresses important things about addicted people and their outlooks, and that people regularly decide, successfully, to quit addictions.

Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda

Amy Wallace

Those of us who survived the sixties and seventies, their drug-use and mysticism, will recall the strange stories told by Carlos Castaneda, an American anthropologist who claimed to have apprenticed himself to a psychedelic Yaqui Indian shaman Castaneda called Don Juan. His books became massive nest sellers, which seems hard to comprehend now. It turns out that Castaneda’s personal life was just as mystical and hard to believe as were his tall tales about Don Juan. Amy Wallace is the daughter of novelist Irving Wallace. And this book is a tribute, not to drugs or mystical journeys through time and space, but about being a cruel love captive to an extremely self-centered man, who pitted women against one another while using his same claims of super human abilities as ways to pull power plays on susceptible women. Wallace only became free of Castaneda after his death – and not even then. The book is scary, illuminating, and makes you review the psychedelic revolution with a new eye.

How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe had a long-term involvement with heroin — yet she refuses to see it as an uncontrollable disease. Rather, she understands her reliance on the drug as an expression of her outlook, experience, social situation, and personal needs, as something which she could give up when she was psychologically and situationally prepared to do so. She tells her story through the novel approach of creating a lexicon of drug-related words and experiences. According to Marlowe:

Not for a minute can I subscribe to the popular view, encouraged by William Burroughs, of addiction as uncontrollable need. Still less can I take addiction as the excuse for bad behavior. No one would condone a person who stole or neglected her children because he or she was feeling bad from the flu, and all but the severest dopesickness is no more rigorous than a nasty flu. Unpleasant? Yes. Sufficient explanation for amoral selfishness? Scarcely.

The Myth of Addiction: An Application of the Psychological Theory of Attribution to Illicit Drug Use

John Booth Davies

A critical psychological analysis of the meaning of addiction to those who use and experience the term. John Booth Davies believes that mechanistic conceptions of the drug-taking process must be replaced by an approach that concentrates on issues of volition, control and competence. In this way an individual can be encouraged to take an active and constructive role in health-related behaviour, thereby minimizing the dangerous consequences, to self and society, of drug use.

Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism As a Disease

Herbert Fingarette

A classic refutation of and answer to the idea that alcoholism is a disease.

Herbert Fingarette is at the forefront of a social counterrevolution that could redefine how the United States views alcoholism.
—Curtis J. Sitomer, Christian Science Monitor

Social and political responses to alcohol problems are neglected and research programmes misdirected, because the disease model prevails so strongly. Fingarette is having a tough time bringing this truth to the American public, but his book is a triumph of clarity and brevity and must help.
—Richard Smith, British Medical Journal, The British Medical Association

A formidable critique of alcoholism as a disease.
—Robert Wright, The New Republic

The message of this book is important and will no doubt elicit violent reactions from both sides of the disease-concept controversy. Although hardly the last word, the book should be read by anyone interested in the breader picture of alcoholism, its treatment and social implications.
—Lawrence Miller, Psychology Today

The Addiction Concept: Working Hypothesis or Self-Fulfilling Prophesy?

Glenn D. Walters

This ambitious volume considers a broad range of biological, genetic, psychological, and sociological theories of addiction, and finds all the key approaches to the concept to be lacking.  Indeed, Walters believes, the idea of addiction has been oversold, or reified, beyond any usefulness it might have.  He describes logical, empirical, and applied correctives to current thinking about addiction.

Rules, Rituals, and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette

Mary I. Bockover (Ed.)

This book contains Stanton's essay "Herbert Fingarette, Radical Revisionist: Why are people so upset with this retiring philosopher?"