Credits & Critiques
Stanton evaluates figures in the addiction field for their contributions, for better or worse, to the state of addiction theory and practice today.
Herbert Fingarette: Why are people so upset with this retiring philosopher?
Stanton takes time off to analyze the systematic assault on someone else - Herb Fingarette - based on Herb's refutation of the crazy disease theory of alcoholism. For example, a colleague of Fingarette's at the University of California in Santa Barbara, William Madsen, wrote an entire booklet attacking Fingarette.
Robin Room and The Sociological Unconscious
Robin Room is a major sociologist/epidemiologist in the alcohol field, formerly director of the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, then vice president of research at the now-defunct Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto. Robin has been a major advocate of the limitation of alcohol supplies as public health policy to prevent alcohol problems.
Jellinek was a liar and a fraud!
E.M. Jellinek, the distinguished founder of the Yale (later Rutgers) Center of Alcohol Studies and progenitor of the modern disease theory of alcoholism, was a faker who made up his academic credentials. This is especially amusing because William Madsen, a great defender of AA, attacked Herb Fingarette for his work in Heavy Drinking, claiming Herb didn't know Jellinek's academic credentials—about which Madsen refused to tell him!
R. Brinkley Smithers: The Financier of the Modern Alcoholism Movement
The dominance of the disease view in America is due in good part to one man -- R. Brinkley Smithers. Through his personal contributions and those of the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation he commanded, Smithers influenced the course of the major national groups concerned with alcohol problems in the United States.
