Understanding Addiction

The paper I recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (linked here, summary linked here) detailed my best arguments against the disease model of addiction. But it also explored new territory, and that’s the topic of today’s post. I emphasized (as I have for years) that addiction is learned. It is not a […] (Read the rest.)

It’s been 2 1/2 weeks since I put up that summary of Maia Szalavitz’s excellent article. Busy time since then. But now I’m in Boston, visiting my friend Matt Robert and a few others, and sitting in on SMART recovery meetings. Matt has been a SMART facilitator for over six years. I came here to […] (Read the rest.)

For years, Maia Szalavitz has been making insightful, practical, and evidence-based contributions to the struggle against “the War on Drugs” and the harmful policies that emerge from it. With her permission, and the permission of editor Will Godfrey, I’m posting passages from an article she published in Filter, a magazine covering drug use, drug policy […] (Read the rest.)

I just listened to the first 15 minutes of a lecture by Robert Sapolsky, a renowned biologist and Stanford professor. Sapolsky begins with an incisive lesson on why humans rely on categories. Categories, he says, make it easier to think about complex phenomena. And human social behaviour is nothing if not complex. My friend Tom […] (Read the rest.)

I’ve been working with a client (I’ll call him Robert) who’s trying to stop using cocaine. We’ve had some powerful sessions lately, emotionally moving for me as well as for him. I really want to help Robert — or, more to the point, I want him to succeed, with or without my help. He’s just […] (Read the rest.)