Alcohol and Drugs History Society

Addiction (book)

Moria L. Plant and Martin A. Plant, eds., Addiction, 4 vols. [Major Themes in Health and Social Work] (Routledge, 2008). Massive collection of reprints. Includes many historical articles.

Addiction: Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare
Edited by Moira and Martin Plant
Volume 1: Concepts of Addiction and Tobacco
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction to volume 1
Concepts of Addiction
1. Bacon, S. (1943) ?Sociology and the problems of alcohol: Foundations for a sociologic
study of drinking behaviour,? Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 4: 402-445.
2. Bill, W. (1955) ?Bill?s Story?, in Alcoholics Anonymous: the story of how many
thousands of men and women recovered from alcoholism, New York. Alcoholics
Anonymous Publishers, pp. 1-16.
3. Eddy, N., Halbach, H., Isbell, H. and Seevers, M., (1965) ?Drug dependence: Its
significance and characteristics,? Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 32: 721-
733.
4. Davies, D.L. (1974) ?Is alcoholism really a disease?? Contemporary Drug Problems,
X: 197-212.
5. Heyman, G.M. et al. (1996) Resolving the contradictions of addiction,? Behavioural
and Brain Sciences, 19: 561-574, 606-610.
6. Peele, S. (2001) ?What addiction is and is not: The impact of mistaken notions of
addiction,? Addiction Research, 8: 599-607.
7. Orford, J. (2001) ?Addiction as excessive appetite,? Addiction, 96: 15-31.
8. Weiss F. and Porrino L.J. (2002) ?Behavioral Neurobiology of alcohol addiction:
Recent advances and challenges? The Journal of Neuroscience, 22, 9: 3332-3337.
9. Shaffer H.J., LaPlante D.A., LaBrie R.A. et al. (2004) ?Towards a syndrome model of
addiction: Multiple expressions, common eitiology,? Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 12:
367-374.
Tobacco
Part 1) Patterns of use and problems
10. Wynder, E.L. and Graham, E.A. (1950) ?Tobacco smoking as a possible
etiologic factor in bronchogenic carcinoma: a study of six hundred and eighty-four
proved cases,? Journal of the American Medical Association, 143, 4: 329-336.
11. Doll, R and Hill, A.B. (1950) ?Smoking and carcinoma of the lung: preliminary
report,? British Medical Journal, 2: 739-748.
12. Russell, M. A. (1971) ?Cigarette smoking: natural history of a dependence disorder,?
British Journal of Medical Psychology, 44, 1: 1-16.
13. US Surgeon?s General (1986) The Health Consequences of Involuntary Smoking,
Rockville, Maryland: US Department of Health and Human Services.
14. Ziedonis D., Williams J.N., Smelson D. (2003) ?Serious mental illness and tobacco
addiction: A model programme to address this common but neglected issue, The
American Journal of Medical Science,326: 223-230.
15. Wayne G.F., Connolly G.N., Henningfield J.E. (2004) ?Assessing internal tobacco
industry knowledge of the neurobiology of tobacco dependence,? Nicotine and Tobacco
Research, 6, 6: 927-940.
Part 2) Treatment Approaches
16. Russell, M. A. H., Wilson, C., Taylor, C. and Baker, C. D. (1979) ?Effect of general
practitioners? advice against smoking,? British Medical Journal, 2: 231-235.
17. Jarvis, M. J., Raw, M., Russell, M. A. H. and Feyerabend, C. (1982) ?Randomised
controlled trial of nicotine chewing-gum,? British Medical Journal, 285: 537-540.
Part 3) Control Policies
18. King James I of England and VI of Scotland (1604) Counterblaste to
Tobacco, London.
19. Lantz, P.M., Jacobson, P.D., Warner, K. E., Wasserman, J., Pollack, H.A., Berson, J.
and Ahlstr¿m, A. (2000) ?Investing in youth tobacco control: a review of smoking
prevention and control strategies,? Tobacco Control, 9: 47-63.
20. Borland, R., Yong, H-H., Siahpush, M., Hyland, A., Campbell, S., Hastings, G.,
Cummings, K. M. and Fong, G.T. (2006) ?Support for and reported compliance with
smoke-free restaurants and bars by smokers in four countries: findings from the
International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey,? Tobacco Control, 15 (Suppl
3): iii34-iii41
Volume 2: Alcohol
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction to volume 2
Part 1) Patterns of use and problems
21. Anstie, F. E. (1862) ?Is it food, medicine, or poison?? Cornhill Magazine, 5: 707-
716.
22. Sullivan, W.C. (1899) ?A note on the influence of maternal inebriety on the
offspring,? Journal of Mental Science, 45: 489-503.
23. Jellinek, E.M. (1945) ?Classics in the alcohol literature; a specimen of the sixteenth-
century German drink literature ? Obsopoeus? Art of Drinking,? Quarterly Journal of
Studies on Alcohol 5: 647-661.
24. Jellinek, E.M. (1952) ?Phases of alcohol addiction,? Quarterly Journal of Studies on
Alcohol, 13: 673-684
25. Davies, D.L. (1962) ?Normal drinking in recovered alcohol addicts,? Quarterly
Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 23: 94-104.
26. Knupfer,G. (1967) ?The epidemiology of problem drinking,? American Journal of
Public Health, 57, 6: 973-986
27. Cahalan, D., and Cisin, I.H. (1968) ?American drinking practices: Summary of
findings from a national probability sample. II. Measurement of massed versus spaced
drinking,? Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 29: 642-656.
28. Jones, K.L. and Smith, D.W. (1973) ?Recognition of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in
early infancy,? Lancet, 2: 999-1001.
29. Room, R. (1975) ?Normative Perspectives on Alcohol Use and Problems,? Journal of
Drug Issues, 5: 358-368.
30. Edwards, G. and Gross, M. (1976) ?Alcohol dependence: provisional description of a
clinical syndrome,? British Medical Journal, 1: 1058-61.
31. Celentano, D. and McQueen, D. (1978) ?Reliability and validity of estimators of
alcohol prevalence,? Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 39: 869 ? 878.
32. Skog, O-J. (1985) "Collectivity of drinking cultures: A theory of the distribution of
alcohol consumption," British Journal of Addiction, 80: 83-99.
33. Kreitman, N. (1986) ?Alcohol consumption and the prevention paradox,? British
Journal of Addiction, 81: 353-363.
34. Wilsnack, R.W., Vogeltanz, N.D., Wilsnack, S.C., Harris, T.R. Ahlstr¿m, S., Bondy,
S., Csemy, L., Ferrence, R., Ferris. J., Fleming. J., Graham, K., Greenfield, T., Guyon,
L., Haavio-Mannila, E., Kellner, F., Knibbe, R., Kubicka, L., Loukomskaia, M.,
Mustonen, H., Nadeau, L., Narusk. A., Neve, R., Rahav, G., Spak, F., Teichman, M.,
Trocki, K., Webster, I. and Weiss, S. (2000) ?Gender differences in alcohol consumption
and adverse drinking consequences: Cross-cultural patterns,? Addiction, 95, 2: 251-265.
35. Single, E., Robson, L., Xie, X. and Rehm, J., (1998) ?The economic cost of alcohol,
tobacco and illicit drugs in Canada, 1992?, Addiction÷93, 7: 991-1006
Part 2) Treatment Approaches
36. Lolli, G. (1952) "Alcoholism, 1941-1951: a survey of activities in research,
education and therapy.V. The treatment of alcohol addiction," Quarterly Journal of
Studies on Alcohol, 13 (3) 461-471.
37. Chafetz, M., Blane, H., Abram, H., Golner, J., Lacy, E., McCourt, W., Clark, E and
Meyers, W., (1962) ?Establishing treatment relations with alcoholics,? Journal of
Nervous and Mental Diseases, 134: 395-409.
38. Sobell, M. B., and Sobell, L. C. (1973) ?Alcoholics treated by individualized
behavior therapy: One year treatment outcomes,? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 11:
599-618.
39. Emrick, C. (1975) ?A review of psychologically oriented treatment of alcoholism: II.
The relative effectiveness of different treatment approaches and the effectiveness of
treatment versus no treatment,? Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 36, 1: 88-99.
40. Orford, J. et al. (1976) ?Abstinence or Control: the outcome for excessive drinkers
two years after consultation,? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 15, 31-38.
41. Miller, W. (1983) ?Motivational interviewing with problem drinkers,? Behavioural
Psychotherapy, 11: 147-172.
42. Prochaska, J.O and DiClemente, C.C. (1986) ?Toward a comprehensive model of
change,? In: Miller, W.R. and Heather, N. (Eds.) Treating Addictive Disorders:
Processes of Change. Applied Clinical Psychology Series, New York, NY: Plenum Press,
pp. 3-27.
43. Project MATCH Research Group (1998) ?Matching alcoholism treatments to client
heterogeneity: Project MATCH three-year drinking outcomes,? Alcoholism: Clinical and
Experimental Research, 22, 6: 1300-11.
44. UKATT Research Team (2005) ?Effectiveness of treatment for alcohol problems:
findings of the UK alcohol treatment trial (UKATT),? British Medical Journal 331: 541-
544.
45. Tober, G., Godfrey, C., Parrott, S., Copello, A., Farrin, A., Hodgson, R., Kenyon, R.,
Morton, V., Orford, J., Russell, I and Slegg, G, on behalf of the UKATT research team
(2005) ?Setting standards for training and competence: The UK alcohol; treatment trial,?
Alcohol & Alcoholism, 40, 5: 413-418.
Part 3) Control Policies
46. Fahey, D. M. (1971) ?Temperance and the Liberal Party: Lord Peel's Report, 1899,"
Journal of British Studies 10: 132-159
47. Makela, K. and Viikari, M., (1977) ?Notes on alcohol and the state,? Acta
Sociologica, 20, 2: 155-179
48. Pittman, D.J. (1995) "Harm reduction, not alcohol consumption reduction,"
Addiction, 90: 1550-1551.
49. Midanik, L. T. (2004) ?Biomedicalization and alcohol studies: Implications for
policy,? Journal of Public Health Policy, 25, 2: 211-228
50. Blocker, J.S. (2006) ?Did Prohibition really work? Alcohol Prohibition as a public
health innovation," American Journal of Public Health 96, 2: 233-343.
51. Heather, N. (2006) ?Controlled, drinking, harm reduction and their roles in the
response to alcohol-related harm,? Addiction Research and Theory, 14, 1: 7-18.
.
Volume 3: Illicit Drugs
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction to volume 3
Part 1) Patterns of use and problems
52. Becker, H.S. (1953-1954) ?Becoming a marihuana user,? American Journal of
Sociology, LIX: 235-242.
53. Goode, E. (1969) ?Multiple drug use among marijuana smokers,? Social Problems,
17: 48-62.
54. Robins, L, N., Davis, D. H., and Nurco, D. N, (1974) ?How permanent was Vietnam
drug addiction?? American Journal of Public Health, 64. (Suppl): 38-43.
55. Orcutt, J. D. (1975) ?Social determinants of alcohol and marijuana effects: A
systematic theory,? The International Journal of the Addictions, 10: 1021-1033.
56. Waldorf, D. (1983) ?Natural recovery from opiate addiction: Some social-
psychological processes of untreated recovery,? Journal of Drug Issues, 13: 237-280.
57. Adlaf, E.M. and Smart, R.G. (1983) ?Risk taking and drug use behaviour: an
examination,? Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 11: 287-296.
58. Des Jarlais, D., Wish, E., Friedman, S.R., Stoneburner, R.L., Yancovitz, F., Midihan,
D., El-Sadr, W., Brady, E. and Cuadrao, M. (1987) ?Intravenous drug users and the
heterosexual transmission of the aquired immunodeficiency syndrome,? New York State
Journal of Medicine, 87: 283-286.
59. Darrow, W. and the Centers for Disease Control Collaborative Group for the Study of
HIV-1 in Women, (1990) ?Prostitution, intravenous drug use, and HIV1 in the United
States,? In: Plant, M.A. (Ed.) Aids, Drugs and Prostitution, Routledge: London, pp. 18-
40.
60. Chen, K. and Kandel D. (1995) ?The natural history of drug use from adolescence to
mid-thirties in a general population sample,? American Journal of Public Health, 85, 1:
41-47.
61. Kandel, D.B. (2003) "Does marijuana use cause the use of other drugs?" Journal of
the American Medical Association, 289: 482-483.
62. Adinof, B. (2004) ?Neurobiologic processes in drug reward and addiction,? Harvard
Review of Psychiatry 12: 305-320.
Part 2) Treatment Approaches
63. Vaillant, G.E. (1996) "Addictions over the life course: Therapeutic implications" In:
Edwards, G. and Dare, C. (Eds.), Psychotherapy, Psychological Treatments and the
Addictions, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-18.
64. Johnson, K., Bryant, D.D., Collins, D.A., Noe, T.D., Strader, T.N. and Berbaum, M.
(1998) "Preventing and reducing alcohol and other drug use among high-risk youths by
increasing family resilience," Social Work, 43, 4 :297-308.
65. Velleman, R., Templeton, L. and Copello, A. (2005) "The role of the family in
preventing and intervening with substance use and misuse: A comprehensive review of
family interventions, with a focus on young people," Drug and Alcohol Review, 24: 93-
109.
Part 3) Control Policies
66. Kinder, B.N., Pape, N.E. and Walfish, S. (1980) ?Drug and alcohol education
programs: a review of outcome studies,? International Journal of the Addictions, 15,
7: 1035-1056.
67. Room, R., (1981) ?The case for a problem prevention approach to alcohol drug and
mental problems,? Public Health Reports 96, 1: 26-33
68. Stimson, G. (1987) ?British drug policies in the 1980s?. In Drug Use and Misuse: A
Reader, London: Open University Press, pp. 118-125.
69. Goldstein, A. and Kalant, H. (1990) ?Drug policy: striking the right balance,? Science
249: 1513-1521
70. Stimson, G. (1990) ?AIDS and HIV: The challenge for British drug services,? British
Journal of Addiction, 85:329-339
71. Kerr, T., Small, W. and Wood, E. (2005) ?The public health and social impacts of
drug market enforcement: A review of the evidence,? International Journal of Drug
Policy, 16: 210-220.
Volume 4: Other Addictions
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction to volume 4
Part 1) Patterns of use and problems
72. Gull, W.W. (l873), ?Anorexia Nervosa (apepsia hysterica, anorexia hysterica?, in
Kaufman M.R. and Herman, M., (Eds.) (1964) Evolution of Psychosomatic Concepts,
New York: International Universities Press, pp. 132-136.
73. Marks, I. (1990) ?Behaviourial (non-chemical) addictions,? British Journal of
Addiction, 85: 1389-1394.
74. Greenberg, J.L., Lewis, S.E. and Dodd, D.K. (1999) "Overlapping addictions and
self-esteem among college men and women," Addictive Behaviors, 24: 565-571.
75. Fisher, S. (1999) "Prevalence study of gambling and problem gambling in British
adolescents," Addiction Research, 7, 6: 509-538.
76. Ladouceur, R., Boudreault, N., Jacques, C. and Vitaro, F. (1999) "Pathological
gambling and related problems among adolescents" Journal of Child and Adolescent
Substance Abuse, 8, 4: 55-68.
77. Breslin, F.C., Sobell, M.B., Cappell, H., Vakili, S. and Poulos, C.X. (1999) "The
effects of alcohol, gender, and sensation seeking on the gambling choices of social
drinkers," Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 13: 243-252.
78. Corte, C. and Stein, K.F. (2001) "Eating disorders and substance use: An examination
of behavioral associations," Eating Behaviors, 1: 173-189.
79. Dunn, E.C., Larimer, M.E.and Neighbors, C.(2002) "Alcohol and drug-related
negative consequences in college students with bulimia nervosa and binge eating
disorder," International Journal of Eating Disorders, 32: 171-178.
80. Penas-Lledo, E., Sancho, L. and Waller, G. (2002) "Eating attitudes and the use of
alcohol, tobacco, and exercise among male and female adolescents," Eating Behaviors, 3:
101-111.
81. Von Ranson, K.M., McGue, M. and Iacono, W.G. (2003) ?Disordered eating and
substance use in an epidemiological sample: II. Associations within families,"
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 17, 3: 193-202.
82. Benton, D. (2004) ?The biology and psychology of chocolate craving,? In: Nehig, A.
(Ed.) Coffee, Tea, Chocolate and the Brain, Boca Raton, Fl: CRC Press, pp. 205-218.
83. Krahn, D., Kurth, C., Demitrack, M. and Drewnowski, A. (1992) "The relationship of
dieting severity and bulimic behaviors to alcohol and other drug use in young women,"
Journal of Substance Abuse, 4: 341-353.
84. Vander Bilt J., Dodge H.H., Pandav R., Shaffer, H. J. and Ganguli, M. (2004)
?Gambling participation and social support among older adults: A longitudinal
community study? Journal of Gambling Studies 20, 4: 373-390.
85. Orford, J. (2003) Problem Gambling and other Behavioural Addictions, London:
Office of Science and Technology.
86. Grant, J.E., Kushner, M.G. and Kim, S.W. (2002) ?Pathological gambling,? Alcohol
Research and Health, 26, 2: 143-150.
87. Wiebe, J.M.D.and Cox, B.J. (2001) "A profile of Canadian adults seeking treatment
for gambling problems and comparisons with adults entering an alcohol treatment
program," Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (La Revue Canadienne de Psychiatrie), 46:
418-421.
88. Petry, N.M. (2001) "Substance abuse, pathological gambling, and impulsiveness,"
Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 63: 29-38.
89. Stewart, S.H.and Kushner, M.G. (2003) "Recent research on the comorbidity of
alcoholism and pathological gambling," Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental
Research, 27, 2: 285-291.
90. Griffiths, M. D., and Wood, R.T.A. (2000) ?Risk factors in adolescence: The case of
gambling, video-game playing and the Internet,? Journal of Gambling Studies, 16, 2/3:
199-225.
91. Young K.S.(2004) ?Internet addiction: A new clinical phenomenon and it?s
consequences,? American Behavioral Scientist, 48, 4: 402 415.
92. Carmin, C.N. (1998) "Addicted women: When your patient can't stop drinking,
smoking, shopping, eating," International Journal of Fertility and Women's Medicine, 43,
4: 179-185.
93. Koran, L.M., Ronald J. Faber, R.J.. D., Elias Aboujaoude, D., Michael D. Large,
M.D. and Richard T. Serpe, R.T (2006) ?Estimated prevalence of compulsive buying
behavior in the United States,? American Journal of Psychiatry 163, 10: 1806-1812.
94. Dobbs Butts, J. (1992) ?The relationship between sexual addiction and sexual
dysfunction,? Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 3: 128-135.
95. Carnes P.J., Murray R.E., Charpentier L. (2005) ?Bargains with chaos: Sex addicts
and addiction interaction disorder,? Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, 12: 79-120.
96. James, J. E. and Stirling, K. P., (1983) ?Caffeine: a survey of some of the known and
suspected deleterious effects of habitual use?, British Journal of Addiction, 78: 251-283.
Part 2) Control Policies
97. Griffiths, M. D. (1993) ?Fruit machine gambling: The importance of structural
characteristics,? Journal of Gambling Studies, 9, 2: 101-120.
Part 3) Treatment approaches
98. Goodman, A. (1992) ?Sexual addiction: Designation and treatment,? Journal of Sex
and Marital Therapy, 18, 4: 303-314.
99. Koski-Jannes, A. and Turner, N. (1999) "Factors influencing recovery from different
addictions," Addiction Research, 7, 6: 469-492.
100. Hall, A.S., and Parsons, J. (2001). "Internet addiction: College student case study
using best practices in cognitive behavior therapy." Journal of Mental Health Counseling,
23, 4: 312-327.
Index

New generation gap as older addicts seek help

The New York Times reports about the needs of older addicts here.

Celebrity Rehab

Celebrity Rehab is the first television series to chronicle the dramatic, unscripted real life experiences of a group of actual celebrities as they make the life-changing decision to enter themselves into a drug, alcohol and addiction treatment program with the sincere desire to achieve true rehabilitation and recovery.

Find the show's website here.

A blogger recaps each episode of the experiment here.

(Thanks to Trysh Travis for the links).

Bush says faith helped him beat drinking

President Bush is talking more openly lately about his old drinking habit, and on Tuesday he offered perhaps his most pointed assessment yet by saying plainly that the term "addiction" had applied to him.

Read the full story here.

(Thanks to Trysh Travis for the link).

Should products disclose caffeine content?

The (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration currently requires beverage companies to list “caffeine” on product labels when it is added as an ingredient. But consumers don’t have to be told how much caffeine is present, even though pregnant women should limit caffeine consumption to about 300 milligrams a day, and children, who have seemingly boundless energy anyway, are more susceptible to the effects because of their low body weight.

For the last decade the Centers for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has unsuccessfully lobbied the FDA to require caffeine-content disclosures on food and beverages so consumers can make educated decisions.

“Caffeine is an addictive stimulant,” said CSPI’s director of legal affairs, Bruce Silverglide. “And it’s the only drug added to a wide variety of foods.”

Read more here.

'Adopt out' the children of drug addicts

A major parliamentary inquiry in Australia has recommended young children be taken away from drug-addicted parents permanently and adopted out.

The Canberra Times reports.

Developing concepts of addiction (dissertation)

Katherine H. Nelson, "The temperance physicians: developing concepts of addiction" (Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 2006).

Drugs and empire (book)

James H. Mills and Patricia Barton, eds., Drugs and Empires:
Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication 1500-1930
(Palgrave, forthcoming 2007). Mosly about opium and to large extent about China.

Introduction; J.H.Mills & P. Barton
PART 1: CONSUMPTION
China, British imperialism and the myth of the 'Opium Plague'; F. Dikötter, L. Laamann & X. Zhou
Developing Habits: Opium and Tobacco in the Indonesian Archipelago, c. 1619-c. 1794; G.B.Souza
Early British encounters with the Indian opium eater; R.Newman
'Cannot we induce the people of England to eat opium?' The moral economy of opium in colonial India; J.F.Richards
PART 2: CONTROL
Opium and the Trading World of Western India in the Early Nineteenth Century; A.Farooqui
Dangerous Drinks and the Colonial State: 'Illicit' Gin Prohibition and Control in Colonial Nigeria; C.J.Korieh
Empire and Excise: Drugs and drink revenue and the fate of states in south Asia; M.J.Gilbert
Powders, Potions and Tablets: The 'quinine fraud' in British India, 1890 to 1939; P.Barton
PART 3: 'HIGH' POLITICS
Colonial Africa and the international politics of cannabis: Egypt, South Africa and the origins of global control; J.H.Mills
'A grave danger to the peace of the East': Opium and Imperial Rivalry in China, 1895-1920; W.O.Walker III
'Wolf by the Ears': The Dilemmas of Imperial Opium Policymaking in the 20th Century; W.B.McAllister
The Trade-Off: Chinese Opium Traders and Antebellum Reform in the United States, 1815-1860; K.Gray

Time's cover story on addiction

Time, 16 July 2007, devotes its cover story to addiction (alcohol, drugs, gambling).

Just one cigarette can lead to addiction: study

Some young people show signs of addiction after inhaling just one cigarette, say U.S. researchers.

In a four-year study of more than 1,200 sixth-grade students in Massachusetts, 10 per cent of those who smoked were addicted within two days of first inhaling, and another 25 per cent were hooked within a month.

Among the 217 students who had smoked, just over half became addicted.

The CBC reports.

Opium and Chinese exclusion laws (book)

Diana L. Ahmad, The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West (University of Nevada Press, 2007).

Celebrity Rehab

Optimism, it turns out, is one of the main things offered at rehabilitation centers like Promises, the luxurious Malibu retreat for patients suffering from alcohol and substance abuse...Much harder to come by is evidence that these programs work.

The quiet truth in the upper-crust rehabilitation industry is that $49,000 a month may buy lots of things — including views of the Pacific, massage therapy and blue-ribbon chefs. But whether it buys sobriety is very uncertain.

The New York Times reports.  (Thanks to Trysh Travis for the link).

Addicts get daily fix of friendship

Ravi Padhye is director of the Maitree De-addiction Treatment-cum-Rehabilitation Centre. Perhaps the only one of its kind in Central India, the de-addiction centre is run by a group of people, mostly comprising reformed addicts. Maitree gets patients in the 22-70 years age group from not just Vidarbha, but Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It runs entirely on its own, without any help from the government whatsoever.

Read more here.

'It's part of our lifestyle now,' says LCBO manager

A feature story in Saturday's Globe and Mail examines Canada's alcohol dependency:

In 2005, Canadians downed the equivalent of 7.9 litres of pure alcohol for every drinker and teetotaller over age 15. And many of us drink often -- consuming about 30 per cent more than the world average.

The social cost of our new lifestyle is staggering: $14.6 billion in 2002, and no doubt more in the years since. The health care bill alone is $3.3 billion -- higher than the price tag to treat cancer. We spent 1.6 million days in the hospital because of illnesses and accidents caused by people under the influence of alcohol.

For the first time, more people died from liver cirrhosis -- regarded as a benchmark of a country's problem drinking -- than on the roads in drunken car crashes.

Find the full story here.

The rise of technology addiction

The seemingly exponential growth of portable technology has sparked fears that people are becoming addicted or swamped by gadgets and their uses.  The BBC reports.

Daily Register Exclusive (Part 3):Trysh Travis finds something to like about HBO's Addiction project

Barbara Koppel’s “Steamfitters Local Union 638” is the most compelling of the nine mini-documentaries that make up HBO’s Addiction. I think I’ve made my skepticism about the multi-platform project’s obsession with addiction as a “scientifically-proven brain disease” clear in previous posts, but let me risk going just a little further over the top by saying that I think that the reason Koppel’s piece is more satisfying as cinema is directly related to its lack of interest in “disease.”

“Steamfitters Local” focuses on the union’s Employee Assistance Program, Directed by Don Perks, a former alcoholic. The hard-drinking steamfitters began making addiction recovery a priority in the 1980s, going so far as to become self-insured so that no managed care-bureaucrats cut short the residential treatment a brother (or sister—none are shown, but they are invoked) needs. Detox and residential treatment are only part of the picture, though, and Koppel’s piece focuses on aftercare, which Perks stresses is crucial to lasting, meaningful recovery.

Although it’s never stated, it’s pretty clear that “aftercare” in this context means working a 12-Step program. Members of the local are shown at a meeting where they introduce themselves with first name only, followed by the telling phrase, “and I’m an alcoholic”; there’s talk of sponsorship and making a commitment to the group; at the edge of the frame in one shot, you can see an AA medallion on Perks’ desk. There’s plenty of talk about recovery, but nary mention of disease.

Instead, Koppel situates her subjects in a cultural and historical context that suggests the ways that both addiction and recovery are shaped by gender, class, and circumstance.  The first things we hear about the steamfitters treat the nature of their work (they install heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems); the first images we see of them are at the job site. One man tells the camera, “steamfitters work in units of two—everybody has a partner. In our business we call it marriage—with no divorces.”

Towards the end of the segment, the foreman congratulates men on a safe day on the job as the work day winds down, while a voiceover by one of the men from the 12-Step group explains that “this program with Don helps you think again, gives you clarity…. Tough guys really ain’t out on the street anymore—step up to the plate and do what you’re supposed to do: support your family, take care of yourself, pay your rent, pay your bills.”

Words and images alike testify to the fact that both the pleasure and the horror attendant on the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs have to do with more than simple brain chemistry or circuitry. They have to do with self-definition, cultural norms, pleasure and power. These are the things that 12-Step philosophy has generally understood and tried to build on; they are also the things that Koppel has historically made movies about.

The will to disregard those dimensions of addiction is palpable in some of the other segments, which uniformly feature addicts who seem to exist free of cultural context. “What can you do to make sure you don’t relapse again?,” the mother of the young blonde heroin addict asks her. “Not be bored. Get a job. Make new friends,” is the reply. Her mother suggests instead that they make a contract. The one African American subject in the entire film, when asked by the clinician what “triggers” his craving for cocaine, replies, “the trigger is here,” and gestures to the deserted Philadelphia street corner where he’s standing. Pointing to his head, he repeats, “it’s not just here—but all out here.”

Several of Addiction’s segments tout the virtues of new drugs (baclofen, buperonorphrine, topiramate) that block the pleasure receptors in the brain, thus making drinking and drugging beside the point, but Koppel’s piece is the only one that addresses the lived context in which synapses fire and compounds metabolize.

Trysh Travis
Assistant Professor of Women's Studies
University of Florida

Paper 'sorry' for cannabis stance

The Independent (on Sunday) carried a front-page apology for its 10-year campaign to legalise cannabis. The newspaper says it has changed its stance in the face of growing fears over addiction to the drug.

The BBC reports.  Find the paper's retraction here.

Daily Register Exclusive (Part 2):Trysh Travis interviews John Hoffman, producer of the HBO Addiction project

TT: One thing I haven’t seen in all the press coverage is the story of how this project got started.

JH: The idea for the Addiction project came from a “hunch” Sheila Nevins (Executive Producer and President of Original Programming at HBO) had, based on experiences with addiction in her own family. She’s been public about those recently. (See the AP wire story on Nevins’ son David here.) She felt like there was new information out there about treating addiction that families of addicts were not getting.

TT: And HBO thought that sounded like a viable project?

JH: They gave us a healthy amount of time to research and her “hunch” proved true—the public is not aware of the fact that we can say scientifically now that addiction is a brain disease. New imaging technology means we can see the craving happening.

TT: How did working off of that knowledge shape the project?

JH: It gave us the idea of how to target the film. We developed a set of ambitious goals for reaching the family. The family is the target, not the addict.

TT: And that target in turn shaped the form?

JH: Yes. The Multimedia format was necessary because of our ambitious goals and messages. We wanted to begin on TV, but some things are more complicated, and would need more time and space to explain. Print-based and web resources could go into more detail, give the families more resources. The project took a long time because we had to develop so much content. The companion volume from Rodale Press includes all new essays by experts who appear on the program and the web site, and uses the same imagery to achieve a unified look. We were very conscious of that.

TT: How about the choice to bring in such well-known filmmakers?

JH: We knew that that would attract a lot of press attention to the project as a whole.

TT: How did the partnership between HBO, the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation evolve?

JH: We knew early on that we wanted to have the project grounded in science, so there would be no question as to the credibility of the message. So we went to D.C. and met with the heads of the agencies and told them our plans. They were eager to work with us and vetted all the content. We also knew from our previous work with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (NB: RWJ gave HBO a $3.3 million grant to make the 3-part “Faces of Addiction” series and website in 1997; Nevins produced two of the films, the documentary Addiction and the docudrama Flashback) that they are such a force in the addiction field that we wanted to work with them to do outreach. HBO can do some of that, but only so much. We showed them some of our stuff, and explained that we wanted to convey it at a grassroots level. They funded the work of Faces and Voices and CADCA, who did the organizing.

TT: There’s a body of scholarship out there that contests the disease model of addiction—sociologists and criminologists, for example who argue that you can’t understand addiction unless you take social forces into account, and psychologists and counselors who argue that behavior modification and harm reduction strategies are more useful modes of intervention. I haven’t seen any evidence of those points of view in the materials I’ve seen so far. Was there a conscious choice to exclude them?

JH: There wasn’t a conscious choice, we just wanted to focus on the scientific explanation of the disease.

Daily Register Exclusive (Part 1):Trysh Travis comments on HBO's Addiction project

Advance press for HBO’s Addiction has been referring to it as a “film,” but if you look at the website you’ll have the strange sensation of not being sure what to call the programming event that begins on HBO on March 15th.

There is a “Film”—it’s the last drop-down menu on the right, and you encounter it only after your eyes travel over five other drop-downs labeled (in fine Public Service Announcement-style) “Understanding Addiction,” “Adolescent Addiction,” “Treatment,” “Aftercare,” and “Stigma and Discrimination.” These appear over the site’s central image—an arresting close-up of a blonde, blue-eyed, young woman, over which is super-imposed the legend “I need help for….”

Push past the informative and interactive features of the site to click on “The Film,” and you’ll find that the generic and formal entity you were expecting doesn’t really exist. There’s a “centerpiece documentary” titled Addiction—but it’s bundled with a “supplementary series” of thirteen additional short films, as well as four additional feature-length documentaries that “capture the personal, family and community struggles caused by addiction.”

If you’re worried (as I am) that all this content is going to crash your DVR capacity, you’ll be relieved to know that a DVD version will be available in stores next week. There is also a “companion book” from Rodale Press, titled Addiction: Why Can't They Just Stop? Rather than duplicating programming content, however, the book offers “a comprehensive consumer guide to navigating the world of addiction treatment.” And finally, lest poring over all this addiction-related material alone in your house start to make you feel a little weird, you can meet some other people who have been sucked into the Addiction vortex, thanks to the 30-city outreach program of “town hall meetings, house parties, briefings and other community-wide events” that piggy-back on the HBO-generated materials.

All this is just to say that you shouldn’t be fooled by the fact that much of the advance press on Addiction has been written by the television critics of your local papers. As the saying goes, “It’s not TV—it’s HBO.” Rather than a program, Addiction is sheer content: crafted with the explicit goal of what the website calls “multiplatform” delivery, it’s a high-quality realization of what media studies scholars call “post-network” TV.

Addiction’s formal aspects should be of interest to readers of the ADHS Daily Register because it looks like its content will be fairly familiar. The website reiterates the classic formulations of the disease concept, emphasizes the need for professional treatment, and stresses that recovery is a life-long project. Save for the expansive language of “alcohol-and-other-drugs,” much of the site content could have been lifted straight from the writings of Marty Mann, Harold Hughes, or some other mid-20th-century Alcoholism Movement activist.

As Addiction unspools over the next couple of weeks, it will be interesting to see whether the various film-makers, clinicians, and educators involved pay any attention to the questions that have compelled the attention of ADHS members and other scholars in recent years—issues like the social construction of vice and disease, the political economy that lies back of addiction (captured so well on that other HBO gem, David Simon’s The Wire), and the cultural politics of the recovery movement, to name just a few. Addiction’s ambition suggests it could encompass such complexities. If it doesn’t, and all we’re getting for the price of premium cable is the old wine of the disease concept packaged in some spiffy new bottles, it will be important to try and figure out why.

Trysh Travis
Assistant Professor of Women's Studies
University of Florida

The Addiction Project

The ADDICTION project is an unprecedented multi-platform campaign aimed at helping Americans understand addiction as a chronic but treatable brain disease.

Premiering Thursday, March 15 at 9pm (ET/PT) on HBO with the centerpiece documentary ADDICTION, the project uses all of the network's digital platforms, including the HBO main service, multiplex channels, HBO On Demand, podcasts and web streams.

Through the lenses of several highly accomplished documentary filmmakers, the current state of addiction in America is explored in nine segments, punctuated by the latest thinking on treatment and recovery by leading experts on drug and alcohol addiction.

Read more here.  Special thanks to Trysh Travis for the link.

Smokers' weak point identified

A man who abruptly quit his 40-a-day smoking habit after suffering a stroke has helped neuroscientists pinpoint a coin-sized craving-centre in the brain.

The man, a long-term smoker, suffered stroke damage to a part of the brain called the insular, and quit, telling researchers his body "forgot the urge to smoke."

The Guardian reports.

Cocaine vaccine – to use or not to use it?

Although a vaccine for cocaine addiction has been discovered, as with every scientific discovery it is now up to society to choose whether or not to make use of it.

The Malta Independent reports.

Spotlight on drink and drugs blight

MORE than 250 experts will meet in Edinburgh today for a major conference on alcohol and drug use in Scotland.

The one-day gathering of senior police figures, academics and health experts at the Scottish Parliament will mark the launch of a year-long study on the subject by Holyrood's think-tank, Scotland's Futures Forum.

Read more here.

Caffeine addiction fear over soft drinks

SOFT drinks manufacturers are adding caffeine to their products, increasing the likelihood that children will become mildly addicted to them, scientific research has suggested.

The Times (of London) reports.

Reno leaders try to tackle meth problem with TV documentary

When it comes to methamphetamine use, Nevada holds a dubious distinction.

The state leads the nation in the number of people who have used meth in their lifetime as well as in the past year and last 30 days, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Now, community leaders are trying to fight back with the help of a 30-minute documentary, "Crystal Darkness: Meth's Deadly Assault on Nevada's Youth," to be shown at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday on nearly every Reno television station.

The Las Vegas Sun reports.

Upscale crack

Oil workers and bankers in Canada appear to be cocaine's newest victims.  For Maclean's Magazine, Alexandra Shimo files this story. 

Addictions

For The Manilla Times, Bob Garon outlines the many types and characteristics of addictions.

Kicking an addiction, with real people

Every time they turn around, smokers are being lectured by nonsmokers about health risks and costs to society, but many of them keep smoking anyway, so pharmaceuticals and anti-smoking groups are turning to smokers and ex-smokers themselves to make the point.

The IHT reports.

Betty Ford will again be in the spotlight

Betty Ford will mourn her husband this week the same way she confronted many of her own personal demons and struggles - on America's public stage.

The quiet and reserved former first lady will again be in the nation's spotlight, as she was when she battled breast cancer and drug and alcohol addiction.

Her highly publicized personal struggles, which occurred during and after her husband's presidency, turned her into an accidental activist.

Read more here.

Address substance abuse recovery on the job

A national survey [in the US] on drug use and health indicates that 77.6 percent of adults with substance use disorders were employed in 2004.

Moreover, alcohol and drug abuse was found to be the most common problem for employees, accounting for 20 percent of voluntary employee assistance referrals to treatment and 50 percent of supervisory referrals.

Because the effects of alcohol and drug problems are so pervasive in the workplace, employers play a critical role in steering people toward recovery.

The Boston Herald reports.

Cash award delivers college hopes to recovering addicts

HUNDREDS of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics are to be offered college courses and job training thanks to a £600,000 grant from the National Lottery.

Edinburgh-based charity Access to Industry has been awarded the cash for its Transition project, which is designed to help former drug and alcohol abusers become accustomed to working life.

The Scotsman reports.

Addicted to the Net

Is spending too much time on the internet a bad habit or a serious addiction? Researchers at Stanford University are trying to determine just that.

Gulf News reports.

Addict parents 'fed child overdose'

The heroin-addicted parents of a 22-month-old child fed him lethal methadone over five months before he eventually died of an overdose, a court has heard.

The Guardian reports.

What lifts people out of addiction?

Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette reports on the dilemma of resorting to medication to ease the pains of addiction.

The perils of prescription drugs

Self-medication is, under most circumstances, considered a good omen for health. However, when it comes to the use of tranquilizers and sleeping pills, avoidance is perhaps the best method of operation. Recuperating from the high-tolerance that the human body is likely to develop for these drugs is a testing task.

Karachi's International News reports.

Tripping your way to sobriety

Erika Dyck, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, researches and teaches the history of medicine.

Recently, she studied a series of LSD tests of alcohol-addicted patients carried out in the 1960s in Saskatchewan. The tests were done by British psychiatrists Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies.

She told ABC News that two-thirds of the alcoholics stopped drinking for at least 18 months after receiving one dose of LSD, compared to 25 percent who stopped after group therapy, and 12 percent after individual therapy.

According to Dyck, even Alcoholics Anonymous endorses the LSD research.

Read more here.

Eric Clapton rethinks playing 'Cocaine'

Eric Clapton is playing "Cocaine" in concert again. The recovering drug addict and alcoholic, who founded the Crossroads Centre addiction recovery center on the Caribbean island of Antigua, stopped performing the song written by J.J. Cale when he first got sober.

"I thought that it might be giving the wrong message to people who were in the same boat as me," Clapton recently told The Associated Press.

"But further investigation proved ... the song, if anything, if it's not even ambivalent, it's an anti-drug song. And so I thought that might be a better way to do it, to approach it from a more positive point of view. And carry on performing it as not a pro-drug song, but just as a reality check about what it does." Clapton's band shouts out "dirty cocaine" during the song.

Find the full story here.

Addicted to food

The same brain circuits are involved when obese people fill their stomachs as when drug addicts think about drugs, a finding that suggests overeating and addiction may be linked, U.S. researchers reported. The finding may help in creating better treatments for obesity — a growing problem in the United States and elsewhere.

The Economic Times reports.

Medicalizing addictions, criminalizing addicts (dissertation)

Jason Edwin Glenn, "Medicalizing addictions, criminalizing addicts: Race, politics and profit in narratives of addiction" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University. 2005). War on Drugs.

substance abuse in America (book review)

Joseph A. Califano Jr., High Society: How Substance Abuse Is Destroying America (Public Affairs, forthcoming 2007).

addiction concepts and international control (article)

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 20/2 (Spring 2006): 276-89.

Addiction Concepts and International Control

Robin Room

Abstract. Addiction concepts became established in the wake of the great expansion
of the availability of psychoactive substances through the globalization
of the age of European empires and the industrial revolution. Addiction was
a way of understanding (and locating either in the substance or in individual
deficiencies) the contradictions between ready availability and the demands
for sobriety imposed by the new means of production and transportation.
Originally applied to alcohol, addiction concepts were soon applied to other
substances. The elusive place of addiction concepts in current international
drug control treaties is considered. On the one hand, the “serious evil” and
“danger” of addiction is a preambular justification for the treaties; on the other
hand, the addict and addiction otherwise disappear from consideration, except
in terms of technical criteria for the inclusion of substances.

For more, see here.

Swapping Addictions

"On the heels of a five-year boom in weight-loss surgeries," says The Wall Street Journal, "researchers are observing an unusual phenomenon: Some patients stop overeating -- but wind up acquiring new compulsive disorders such as alcoholism, or compulsive shopping. . . . Some psychologists describe it as a type of 'addiction transfer,' a familiar outcome of substance-abuse treatment whereby patients swap one compulsive behaviour for another. At the Betty Ford Center, for instance, about 25 per cent of alcoholics who relapse switch to a new drug, such as opiates." Excerpted by The Globe and Mail.

alcohol, culture & society newsletter

Culture Alcohol & Society Quarterly: Newsletter of Kirk/CAAS Collections at Brown [University] 2/6 (January/February/March 2006), edited by Jared Lobdell. Includes materials on or related to the San Francisco Dashaways, an installment of the John Ford, S.J., Archive in the Collections of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus, and the continuing series on the Washingtonians. This newsletter and the preceding nine newsletters can be found here.

Substance Abuse Treatment in Southern California (article)

Garrett, Valery. “Substance Abuse Treatment in Southern California: The History and Significance of the Antelope Valley Rehabilitation Centers.” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996), 181-205.

alcohol in contemporary Ukraine (dissertation)

Luba Magdenko, "Societies in Transition: Alcohol Misuse and Conrol Policy in Ukraine" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2005).

Drugs and Race in American Culture

Hickman, Timothy A. “Drugs and Race in American Culture: Orientalism in the Turn-of-the-Century Discourse of Narcotic Addiction.” American Studies 41:1 (2000), 71-92.

Sex Addiction (article)

Jeffrey Falla, "Disorderly Consumption and Capitalism: The Privilege of Sex Addiction." College Literature 28:1 (Winter 2001), 46-63. [Argues, among other things, that "Popular print media sources, such as People, Cosmopolitan, and USA Today, portray sex addiction as a disorder involving consumption, most akin to alcoholism."]

Romancing Opiates

Theodore Dalrymple, Romancing Opiates : Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (Encounter Books, 2006). Book description: Theodore Dalrymple believes that almost everything people know about opiate addiction is wrong. Most flawed of all is the notion that addicts are in touch with profound mysteries of which non-addicts are ignorant. Dalrymple shows that doctors, psychologists and social workers, all of them uncritically accepting addicts' descriptions of addiction, have employed literary myths (drugs are creative and intense) in constructing an equal and opposite myth of quasi-treatment. Using evidence from literature and pharmacology and drawing on examples from his own clinical experience, Dalrymple shows that addiction is not a disease, but a response to personal and existential problems. He argues that withdrawal from opiates is not the serious medical condition, but a relatively trivial experience and says that criminality causes addiction far more often than addiction causes criminality.

Poppycock

Theodore Dalrymple writes about heroin addiction in his essay, "Poppycock," published here in the Wall Street Journal.

Heroin doesn't hook people; rather, people hook heroin. It is quite           untrue that withdrawal from heroin or other opiates is a serious business, so serious that it would justify or at least mitigate the commission of crimes such as mugging. Withdrawal effects from opiates are trivial, medically speaking (unlike those from alcohol, barbiturates or even, on occasion, benzodiazepines such as valium), and experiment demonstrates that they are largely, though not entirely, psychological in origin. Lurid descriptions in books and depictions in films exaggerate them à la De Quincey (and also Coleridge, who was a chronic self-dramatizer).

I have witnessed thousands of addicts withdraw; and, notwithstanding the histrionic displays of suffering, provoked by the presence of someone in a position to prescribe substitute opiates, and which cease when that person is no longer present, I have never had any reason to fear for their safety from the effects of withdrawal. It is well known that addicts present themselves differently according to whether they are speaking to doctors or fellow addicts. In front of doctors, they will emphasize their suffering; but among themselves, they will talk about where to get the best and cheapest heroin.

His new book is called Romancing Opiates.

History of addictions (article)

Berridge, Virginia, and Sarah Mars. "History of addictions." Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 58, no. 9 (2004): 747-750.

New quit-smoking drug approved

The FDA has approved Chantix (active ingredient, varenicline tartrate) to help smokers quit. WebMD has the story here.

Chantix acts at the same sites in the brain as nicotine. It may help people who want to quit smoking in two ways: by providing some nicotine effects to ease withdrawal symptoms and by blocking the effects of nicotine from cigarettes if they resume smoking.

Modafinil for cocaine addiction

Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical writer, reports on April 24 that "Hundreds of cocaine users are testing whether that legal pill, called modafinil, could help them kick the addiction, and there's early evidence that it may. In addition to blunting cocaine's notorious cravings, modafinil might also counter the damage that cocaine wreaks on users' brain circuits — damage that in turn fuels the cycle of addiction." Link here.

Britons have addiction covered

Britons are the biggest chocoholics in Europe, munching through an average 10kg (22lb) per year, figures show. The national sweet tooth cost an average £72 per person last year, compared to the Italians, who spent £18, the market analysts Datamonitor said.

The Independent reports.

Britain is now also top of the European league for cocaine use and is fast approaching levels seen in America, according to the main EU drug agency. Alarmingly, this trend includes the use of the class-A drug among children of secondary school-age, which has doubled in a year.

The Independent reports.

UK Perspective on History of Addictions (Article)

Mervyn London, " History of Addiction: A UK Perspective," American Journal on Addictions 14/2 (March-April, 2005): 97-105.  Addiction has fluctuated in the UK with its lowest point in the early 1900s.

Israel’s 'upside down' coffee saga

For Zeek, Esther Solomon comments on coffee addiction and café society in Israel.

New weapon in battle to beat heroin

A new heroin substitute is to be prescribed in Glasgow. Health chiefs have approved buprenorphine as an alternative to methadone. And the drug could become a major weapon in the battle against heroin dependence.

The Evening Times reports.

'Online porn is as addictive as crack cocaine,' say anti-porn experts

Porn featuring adults and marketed to them is more pervasive than ever, yet activists and experts in the U.S. disagree bitterly over the extent of harm it causes:

"The form of entertainment is no problem," said Paul Cambria, general counsel for the porn industry's Adult Freedom Foundation. "There are individuals who are going to react abnormally to normal material, but it's not a problem for the average person."

For every couple driven apart by porn, there are others whose relationship is enlivened, Cambria argued. He dismissed contentions that porn is highly addictive or brain-damaging. "Some people lie about it," Cambria said. "It's their way of excusing personally unacceptable conduct -- 'It wasn't me, it was porn.'"

Such attitudes infuriate experts on the other side who say online porn is as addictive as crack cocaine.

"The Internet is the perfect delivery system for anti-social behavior -- it's free, it's piped into your house," said Mary Anne Layden, a psychologist and addiction expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "Internet porn is probably the biggest miseducation system we can devise in terms of sexuality, misuse of women."

She says many of her patients, rather than improving their sex lives with porn, suffer sexual dysfunction.

Read more at Salon.

Hitler on Drugs (Video)

High Hitler (A & E Television Network video, distributed by New Video, 2004).  How much was Hitler affected by his drug dependency?

Meth addiction hits boomers hard

Bloomfield, Indiana's Mike Walls never envisioned his golden years as a fight with drug addiction when a friend gave him a plastic bag of crystal-like powder and a promise of youth nearly two decades ago. CNN reports.

Flower-power time warp

Dutch schoolchildren as young as 12 are being treated for addiction to a powerful home-grown marijuana which is up to 20 times stronger than imported varieties, an addiction clinic in the Netherlands has revealed.

The Independent reports.

Addiction vaccines?

Treatments for alcoholics and drug addicts are about to improve dramatically, says an American addiction expert.

"We are on the cusp of remarkable pharmacological treatments for addiction," Dr Marvin Seppala told a workshop yesterday, organised by private Auckland treatment provider the Capri Trust. "In the next 5 to 10 years we are going to have multiple medications available for abstinence."

The New Zealand Herald reports.

'Gene cause' of cocaine addiction

The chances of becoming addicted to cocaine could depend on genes, the Institute of Psychiatry has found. The BBC reports.

Try swapping cocaine for cooking

According to Ireland Online, 24 star Kiefer Sutherland is hooked on cooking after realising he only enjoyed cocaine because of the preparation involved. The actor reveals he was hooked on cocaine for a year but he quit when he realised he could cook up the same thrill in the kitchen. He says: "I did like the ceremony - the ritual of preparing cocaine - as much as doing it. "I feel the same way about cooking now. It's an amazing time to focus on something else. You work out a lot of stuff for your day."

'If you get addicted, you will not only not get into Harvard, you will not finish high school'

More than 7 million Americans are estimated to have misused stimulant drugs meant to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and substantial numbers of teen-agers and young adults appear to show signs of addiction, according to a comprehensive national analysis tracking such abuse.

The statistics are striking because many young people recreationally using these drugs are seeking to boost academic and professional performance, doctors say.

The Seattle Times reports.

Almost too convenient

Addicted to a painkiller, a Monroe woman managed to land a series of receptionist jobs at several Seattle-area medical clinics where her access to the personal records of patients and fellow employees, as well as physicians' prescription pads, enabled her to feed her addiction, federal prosecutors allege.

The Seattle Times reports.

TV show follows drug addict detox

Three heroin addicts will be seen undergoing detox treatment to help kick the habit in a [BBC] Channel 4 series.

Going Cold Turkey will follow two women and a man as they are treated at a clinic in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. It will be shown twice a day for five days, with input from medical experts, ex-addicts and the patients' families.

A Channel 4 spokesman said: "We hope the programme will generate a debate about heroin use and how best users can be helped to kick the habit."

The BBC reports.

'Theyre not just taking one or two either...They're taking handfuls'

According to New Hampshire's chief medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Andrew, methadone, oxycodone (OxyContin), diazepam (Valium), hydrocodone, fentanyl and morphine, to name just a few of the more popular prescription drugs, were credited with killing 96 people, more than half of the 147 drug deaths recorded in New Hampshire in 2005.

MSNBC reports.

'Massive growth' in drug addiction among South Africa's teenagers

Nine out of 10 South African teenagers in drug rehabilitation will revert to their addictions within a year, an expert working with young people said on Friday. "The drug rehabilitation system is not geared towards teenagers," Quintin van Kerken, spokesperson for Bokatie, a teenage rehabilitation centre in Douglasdale, Johannesburg, said. "And this is where the massive growth in addiction is evident." He estimated that there are at least 1 000 teenagers, from all walks of life, in rehabilitation in the Johannesburg area on any given day.

The Mail & Guardian reports.

James Frey: Feelings as Facts

"Why didn't [James] Frey decide to dramatize the life of a privileged twentysomething binge-drinker, in all its plodding bourgeois normalcy,?" asks Trysh Travis, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Because Frey's drinking life was "of the humdrum variety...not the stuff from which blockbusters are made."

Travis comments on the James Frey scandal, comparing him (and George Bush) to truly recovered alcoholics. Find the full article here. 

11-year-old heroin addict

AN 11-YEAR-OLD girl who collapsed in school was being treated in hospital yesterday for heroin addiction. Strathclyde Police said that they were investigating how the child, who has not been identified, became a drug addict. She was taken ill during class at her primary school last Wednesday. She told doctors that she had been “chasing the dragon” — burning heroin and inhaling it through a straw — for more than two months...The girl said that she had bought the drug in £10 bags from a female dealer at the Pollok Shopping Centre on the south side of Glasgow.

The Times reports.

And I quote...

Drug addiction is horrible, addiction to drink is pitiable, but to be a slave of the salted-nut habit is to be lost indeed. Years ago I realized my weakness in this respect, and vowed never to set tooth to salted nut again as long as I lived. But tonight I visited the home of my friend X (a prominent prohibitionist, by the way) and turned as white as a blanched almond when I saw the nut-dish at his elbow. It was obvious from the dry, salty tone of his voice that he had been hitting the cashews pretty hard, and as we talked he ate bowl after bowl of the insidious dainties. His wife (in rags, and barefoot, for their home and fortune had been ruined by this vice) patiently filled the bowl whenever it was empty. Once, however, when she attempted to take a fat filbert from his hand, he struck her brutally across the mouth. I walked home sadly, determined to urge the government to take over the salted-nut industry - vile traffic! - not for profit, but for control.

From Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) in The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (Toronto: Irwin, 1985), pp. 11-12.

Mapping Addiction (Dissertation)

Gordon Coonfield, "Mapping Addiction" (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2003).

Drugs, Policy, and Historians (Article)

David T. Courtwright, "Drug Wars: Policy Hots and Historical Cools," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78/2 (2004): 440-50. Reviews Richard Davenport-Hine, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics (2002), Caroline Jean Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (2002), and David F. Musto, ed., Drugs in America: A Documentary History (2002).

Narcotics and Modernity in the USA (Article)

Timothy A. Hickman, "'Mania Americana': Narcotic Addiction and Modernity in the United States, 1870-1920," Journal of American History 90/4 (March 2004): 1269-94.

Substance Abuse History in USA (Thesis)

Joycelin Kinte Prothro, "The Development of Substance Abuse Treatment in the United States" (MSW thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2005).

A Million Little Lies

The Smoking Gun exposes James Frey's bestselling nonfiction 'memoir,' A Million Little Pieces, as a fraud, filled with 'fabrications, falsehoods, and other fakery.'  It was the most recent pick of the Oprah Book Club, and hugely popular, in part because it repudiated conventional 12-Step wisdom.  The Smoking Gun investigative team, however, has discovered that almost all of the crucial events in it are exaggerated or outright fabrications.

Find the full story here.  (Thanks to Trysh Travis for the link).

Policy and Perceptions of Addiction

Policy and Perceptions of Addiction (lightly edited version of December 2005 thread on ADHS list)

(1) I wonder what people think are the key texts (primary and secondary) on connection between liquor or drug policy and perceptions of addiction?  That is, whether and how policy decisions affected concepts of addiction.

This broad literature would include labelling theory of deviance, I know, but what about more medical perceptions?

Stuff that would be accessible to undergraduate students would especially be helpful.

Dan Malleck, PhD
Assistant Professor, Community Health Sciences
Brock University
500 Glenridge Ave
St. Catharines, Ontario
L2S 3A1

(2) One possibility is Alfred R. Lindesmith, The Addict and the Law, which is a clearly written, historically oriented, and archetypically liberal statement of the harms that flow from criminalizing addiction. The only problem with Lindesmith's position, as Acker and I and others have pointed out, is that, historically, the causality ran in both directions: a change in the composition of the addict population (i.e., more lower class urban male "junkies") precipitated a hardening of policy, which in turn exacerbated the health, behavior, and public image of the users.

David T. Courtwright
John A. Delaney Presidential Professor
Dept. of History
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645

(3) There is, of course, the sociological tradition which starts with
Harry Levine, in parallel with the earlier stuff by Rothman and Foucault
on the discovery of the asylum.  Harry's paper is at:
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/doa.htm
   A more recent paper in the tradition, responding to the critiques by
Warner and Porter of Harry's timing, is Peter Ferentzy's "From sin to
disease: Differences and similarities between past and current
conceptions of chronic drunkenness" Contemporary Drug Problems
28(3):363-390, 2001.
   Then there is Mariana Valverde's book, _Diseases of the Will: Alcohol
and the Dilemmas of Freedom_, Cambridge UP 1998.  One strength of the
book is the effort to link together addiction concepts and the policy
arena.  The weakness is that it ignores much of the existing secondary
literature, such as Levine. 
   There is also my overview piece:
http://www.janushead.org/6-2/Room.pdf in this tradition.
   From the perspective of your question, none of these deal
specifically with the political arena.  There, the modern historical
political-sociological tradition starts with Gusfield.  One classic
piece of his which focuses on "Moral Passage: The Symbolic Process in
Public Designations of Deviance" Social Problems 15(2):175-188, 1967 --
also reprinted as a chapter in his book, _Contested Meanings: The
Construction of Alcohol Problems_ (U Wisconsin Press, 1996).  But this
is a bit outdated (pre-Levine, for instance), and Roizen's dissertation
gives a more nuanced version of alcoholism and policy:
http://www.roizen.com/ron/disshome.htm
   These are of course all about alcohol. On the drug side, along with
Lindesmith, Troy Duster's book is a classic: _The Legislation of
Morality: Law, Drugs and Moral Judgment (Free Press, 1972).  An
influential sociological textbook, with a second edition now getting
long in the tooth, is Peter Conrad & Joseph Schneider, _Deviance &
Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness_ (Temple UP, 1992) -- it has
chapters on alcohol and on drugs, though specialist historians are
likely to wince a bit at some of it.
   This is all very US-oriented.  I have been thinking a bit about how
addiction concepts intertwine with the history of international drug
control (not that this gets far away from the US!)-- here is one piece
on it (in spite of its web reference, it's actually the whole paper): 
http://www.senliscouncil.net/documents/Room_abstract  (which is from the
conference book from this:
http://www.senliscouncil.net/modules/events/lisbon)