Addictions Books

This book doesn't focus on proving things about addiction. Rather, it offers a perspective that is both "new" and ancient. Addiction personality type or personality trap that all humans are capable of falling into - it is, essentially, a pattern. This author blends Native American folklore about the Coyote archetype with sound professional experience. I highly recommend this book for students in counseling/psychology professions, or as a fresh perspective for anyone interested in learning the true nature of addiction.

This book is written by leading psychiatrists who were among the first to identify the powerful danger of addiction to this form of cocaine. Crack was introduced into the Bahamas before it began to have its devastating effects in other countries including the U.S. Drs. Allen and Jekel have studied the crack problem from its inception. Containing much information based on extensive professional involvment with crack addiction and the large-scale social damage it causes, this volume is necessary reading for all serious students of the crack problem

Reeves and Campbell cut through all of the drug war crap in this superb cultural analysis. The role of the news -- especially the television network news -- is clear in the creation of a major "drug problem" and the need for a war on drugs. Need to know why the jails are overflowing with drug users? As this book points out, the Reagan-era news loved this "lock 'em up" story.

This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the physiological process involved in addiction and compulsive behavior. The biggest revelation of this book is that all addictions whether they are substance or behavior based such as gambling, are caused by natural neurochemicals in the brain.

In an era when addiction is running rampant. When you can walk into any convenience store and acquire nicotine, alcohol, junk food, lottery tickets and pornography. Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth discuss more positive ways of achieving a natural high such as involvement in the arts. It's about changing negative behaviors that destroy life into positive ones that add to life.

Jon Schneider Producer A Drug Called Pornography

"Some things never go away." So writes Willam Alton in this shocking new memoir [Alton survived physical and sexual abuse as a child in Okalahoma and Eastern Washington].

Little wonder. With memories of sucker-punch acknowledgements from 'Dad', witnessing his mother being repeatedly raped, and experiencing the personal attention of a pedophile called "Uncle Harold".

Imagine all that happening before your first day of school!

While Alton is brutally honest, there is a surreal, detached quality to his story telling.

"I don't remember much about my folks being married. What I do remember is the noise, the sound of flesh on flesh, of bruises rising, of bones breaking. Violence is its own language, vague and confusing, but a language all the same. Just because I hit you does not mean I don't like you, that I don't love you." Page 16

Crawling Out of My Skin showcases Alton's refreshing new voice in the angst-ridden memoir genre. Frankly I'm tired of reading cheap, psycho-babble analysis-filled memoirs of life with daddy. Don't tell me how I should view your experience. As Frank "Angela's Ashes" McCourt recently said, "Just tell the damned story!"

Alton does. And how! Drug addiction, turning tricks for booze and cigarettes, lock-up visits to mental institutions, sex, abortion, death. This memoir is chock full of the degradation too many victims experience and few in our society comprehend and understand.

I hope Crawling Out of My Skin will be read by educators, social workers, law enforcement, politicians -- all people who are faced with a current generation of Alton-like victims.

I have read many books on dysfunctional, abusive families, but I have never read such a naked, fierce and honest depiction:

"When I was done, I fell over, panting and gasping. Nothing like hurling to wear a body out. I knew I should get up. I knew that if the cops brought me home again, Momma was going to s*@t three colors...I was so tired and so comfortable that even the smell of vomit and dust didn't bother me any. So I lay there a while watching the red and green ghosts, the sunlight painted on the inside of my eyelids and listened to the dull buzz exhaustion makes when you finally get a chance to stop moving." Page 58.

This memoir is as raw as Alton is streetsmart. I couldn't put it down. Readers will be happy to know, Alton is currently working as a teacher and living with his wife and three sons in Portland, Oregon. They will also count their blessings that they never had to live a day in William Alton's shoes.

This book is a great companion for anyone trying to lose weight. As a health professional that has worked for years with people losing weight, the hardest part is getting people to understand that for the weight to come off you need to tackle inner issues along with it. This book helps you do that. I have read it myself and recommend it to all my clients who find it a fantastic help and tell me they read it once through and then continually revisit it for support, guidance, and motivation.

This book is as comprehensive as it gets if you are treating substance abusing offenders. The bibliography is outstanding and the information within the text is useful, informative, and practical. One of the best resources I have in my substance abuse library. Highly recommended.

User-friendly, backed by research with lots of information on a variety of cultures, languages, and dialects.

Dancing Among the Maenads is a both sound, well organized, scientific and creative, indeed an artistic study of the psychopathology of compulsive drug use. Largely based on evidence obtained in case studies, the transference-countertransference manifestations of which are influenced by modern object relations oriented psychoanalytic theory and evidence, this unusual and apealing book speaks to the myriad of complicated, early, preoedipal urges drug usage seeks to permit expression to and the complexity of the intrapsychic and interactional psychological phenomena related to drug use by individuals of varying levels of development and its effects on one's interactions with other individuals and society. A special aspect of the book is its use of relevant material from data obtained from reports and suppositions to be found in the media concerning drug-addicted folk heroes, as well as famous autobiographical studies and mythological drug users.
The book makes a strong case for questioning the current popular emphasis on the biology of drug use.

The author, David Courtwright, provides an updated, historical account of one of the most puzzling questions on the American frontier: how did the drug (opium) addiction get so bad here-- so quickly. Then, he fine tunes his answer with another in which he describes the absolutely harsh laws, fines, and imprisonment of those who become caught in the law enforcement cycle of addiction. He shows quite clearly how doctors and politics played sessions of sanctioning, then criminalizing some of those who played this wheel of misfortune and are still spinning in it. One person "gets" 15 years for a first offense !!! It is written quite directly and to the point, in a reader- friendly fashion, and most everyone I know would enjoy his writing method. Propaganda, lies, exaggerations are used by our government to seeingly make these wonderful medicines, a social vampire. The author is patient and almost penitent in showing how society is punished much of the same way the addicts are for their wrongdoings In an wonderful plant meant to help for chronic pain and suffering for thousands of years, we have demonized it to the point of making it a menace. In that irony, there is no justification. Very little is mentioned of the FDA or DEA and it documeted very nicely. The notes in the back are FANTASTIC!! guyairey