Understanding Addiction

Hi all. I’m finally back in the Netherlands. This is the first time I’ve ever travelled ar0und the world, and I have two things to report. 1. It is indeed round, or else a lot of people have gone to a lot of trouble creating a first-rate illusion. 2. The jet-lag seems to average out […] (Read the rest.)

Hello people. This is not a post but a request. I just got the go-ahead from my agent to begin work on a new book. Here’s the plan — Three or four intimate biographies, of people who have had serious struggles with drugs and/or alcohol, who have become addicted, by one definition or another, and […] (Read the rest.)

My last post was about neurodiversity, and it brought up some great discussion! Now I want to bring all this back to addiction. I’m at this Writers’ Festival in Sydney Australia, extremely jet-lagged, flogging my book, doing radio interviews a couple of times a day, and the same question keeps coming up: Is addiction genetic? […] (Read the rest.)

In a recent post I brought up the age-old debate as to whether addiction is a disease or not. In response, Alese raised the bigger issue of neurodiversity. Many scientists believe that a certain amount of individual diversity is built into human behaviour, because it provides an evolutionary advantage for all of us. It may […] (Read the rest.)

Hi all. A number of you have asked if I could post that talk I gave at CAMH (“the scene of the crime”) on the evening of March 27th. Here’s my talk, converted into a PDF file and annotated for “easy reading”. Still X-rated of course. Enjoy… (Read the rest.)