Drugs Books

This is one of the best books that I have read in a long time. It's very thought provoking and insightful. Ms. Tompkins vividly describes how she overcame her addiction to drugs and alcohol. The book is very easy to understand and once you open it, you can't put it down.

I had the pleasure of first seeing the author when I was student in Tallahassee. I was truly inspired by her and her testimony. And when I saw that she had written a book, I knew I had to buy it. I am very glad that I bought this book.

For all those who thought they were too smart or too well educated to fall into addiction, the true story of a doctor's fall from grace. What makes this book so facinating is that, at the same time he was suffering from addiction, he was a pioneer in the study and treatment of alcoholism.

This book also provides good historical and practical perspective on AA and the other various support organizations. If you want a good how-to on making the best of AA, read here.

On the down side, this book is at times very lecturing in tone, but a lecture well worth listening to.

This book is focusing on saliva assessment especially on determination of corticosteroides, cortisol and cortisone.

A variety of sampling techniques are present and many testing methods, like R.I.A., are simply predesribed.

For detailed descriptions of these methods the necessary reference informations are given.

Normal or excess value levels of the corticosteroides are given, also their presence is well explained depending to the syndrom.

It is a useful reference book and starting point for researchers focusing on saliva.

Avoiding Relapse: Catching Your Inner Con! by psychologist Lynne Namka is a straightforward guide to recovering from substance addiction. Emphasizing the importance of prioritizing sobriety and avoiding self-destructive behavior, and offering tips, tricks, and techniques for identifying and rejecting negative mind games, Avoiding Relapse is a solid and highly recommended supplementary resource, especially to anyone involved with a full participation in addiction recovery programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous.

I read this years ago and then gave it away so this was a replacement. This is an amazing story and I don't understand why the book wasn't more successful.

Dr. kurland is a true pioneer in regards to diagnosing and treating back pain and has made a tremendous contribution with his discovery of the mind/body connection for this condition

"Bad Habits" aims to change the way people think about the issues of personal freedom and social responsibility in America. John Burnham takes drinking, smoking, drugs, gambling, sexual misbehavior, and swearing, all traditionally considered "minor vices" and follows their path into acceptability and colossal profitability. As he states in his preface, he started out thinking he would have a nice laugh at how neo-Puritans can't stand to see other people have a little fun. But by the end of his research, he had stopped laughing.

Burnham made one key decision: rather than focus on the reformers (and just assume that everyone "naturally" wants a drink or a smoke), he decided to focus on the anti-reformers. What was driving them? As he found, money, of course. Pressure for repeal or liberalization of laws and social mores against the "minor vices" starts with back-stage funding by those who sell both the item in question-brewers, casino owners, marijuana dealers, pornographers-and related items, from glass-bottle manufacturers to money launderers. This is not big news, although it's worth repeating that agitation for liberalization of drug laws, for example, has always been funded chiefly by drug traders and their financial allies. Moreover, as Burnham shows, legalization is only the first step. After all, if marijuana is legal and no one smokes it, then the investment in funding legalization organizations has been wasted. Not to worry: Burnham demonstrates that just as prohibition really does work in reducing the "bad habits," so too legalization and a good ad campaign really do increase the number of indulgers. Of course an ad campaign needs to be directed at the right audience. Just as tobacco executives do, pornographers, drug-dealers, and liquor merchants also know that their profits comes from heavy users and heavy users need to be started when they are young.

But who would believe such obviously self-interested advocates? Here Burnham builds on social history to identify "lower-order parochialism" as a significant force advocating and celebrating the "bad habits." Formed in America's 19th century urban areas where minor-vice merchants, exemplified by the saloon-keeper, became intimately intertwined with the bachelor sub-culture, new immigrants, and the Bohemian scene, "lower-order parochialism" validated the "bad habits" as a positive act of rebellion against the dominant Yankee, middle-class, often evangelical, coalition who supported reform campaigns. In the barracks of World Wars I and II, this lower-order parochialism was able to break out of the urban red-light districts and make abstention seem deviant. Those who made money off the minor vices found an increasing public for their campaigns first to normalize and then to celebrate the minor vices. From the repeal of prohibition onwards, Burnham traces the process by which our mores are approximating those of the Victorian underworld.

The minor vice industrial complex has always found vital support in irresponsible members of the upper class: they indulge, they invest, and they find taxes on legal vices can reduce their own. The spread of state-sponsored lotteries as alternatives to income tax increases is a case in point.

But what about the lives ruined by drinking, lung cancer, gambling, and so on? Burnham details how the minor vice industrialists heavily fund organizations that study and combat these problems-but only as long as the organizations treat them as a problem for the individuals concerned and not a problem for the industry. Funding research on alcoholism or "compulsive gambling" forms a wonderful counterpart to the insistent advocacy of more and more "moderate drinking," "responsible gambling," etc. Only where no "responsible" use exists (as in smoking) do they have to resort to stonewalling.

After a century of growth, the minor-vices are not simply isolated entities; they work together synergistically as a combined force aiming to destroy the standards of the "prudes" and replace them with those of the "lewds." Casinos and brothels can't stay in business without selling liquor, liquor and tobacco products are the major advertisers for pornographic magazines, tobacco companies buy up liquor giants, Hugh Hefner financed the marijuana legalization lobby, etc. Thus the significance of swearing: it does not make any money but is a powerful way of outraging "prude" sensibilities and publicly announcing lower-order standards

Burnham does not wish to sound like one of the more hysterical opponents of "bad habits." He does not advocate new campaigns of Prohibition. He bends over backwards to avoid dramatization, and if anything pulls his punches. The massive documentation in Burnham's footnotes show the care he has taken not to push his evidence farther than it will go. But his portrait of the minor-vice industrial complex is all the more troubling for that.

The 1950's were not all Fonzi and his friends. I read "Flee The Angry Strangers" in 1956, in the summer after my first year in law school. It was an unsettling look at the dark side of the 50's, that rang true then, and is one of the few novels that I have not forgotten over time. I saw parallels between some of the characters, and friends from high school and the Korean war. The only note that did not ring true was Joe Dinch's (the "Dincher's") veneration of Louis Armstrong. Some of us listened to Armstrong in Pasadena. He was hyped as the greatest jazz trumpeter of all time. We compared him to Howard McGhee's playing at JATP concerts, Chet Baker with Gerry Mulligan and with his own group, and Shorty Rogers and Rolf Ericsson at the Lighthouse, and couldn't understand all the adulation Armstrong seemed to get from old critics. Growing older has brought a greater appreciation of Mozart and Bix Biederbecke, but, except for a few old Hot Five and Hot Seven sides, not Armstrong. "Flee The Angry Strangers" is worth reading. It is a classic, in the sense that it was ahead of its time, and has the timeless quality to outlive it.

This book should be regarded as an essential text for students of dentistry and dental specialties and a greatly valued text for others in the health sciences. It is clear, concise, informative and short enough to be read from cover to cover. I have used this book in many editions over the years as a student, surgical trainee and teacher and cannot recommend it too highly. I have made it a standard text for the surgical trainees in my Department. This book cannot be over praised.

In the spirit of his earlier books "Rhythm, Riots and Revolution" and "Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles", right-wing rock critic David Noebel fires off another of his tirades on the evil depravities of rock and roll and of all radio stations which play it.

While the Beatles are again the central focus of his wrath (even though they'd already broken up), he devotes an enormous amount of energy to Lou Christie's "Rhapsody in the Rain", which he says imitates the rhythm of sexual intercourse to the sound of windshield wipers. (The song was also denounced by Catholic groups which got it banned on many stations.) Noebel cited interviews with DJs who stated they not only knew what the song was about, they were aware that -- my god! -- "the kids" knew as well.

Apparently, Noebel had gotten hold of a theory that the backbeat in rock and roll has an effect on the cerebro-spinal fluid, causing a cessation of forebrain activity so that the primal, animal parts of the brain take over. Music like this, he said, would speed the downfall of America by hypnotizing "the kids" into having sex and eventually embracing Communism. How this was to be accomplished via sexual intercourse was never explained, since the one thing that activity is guaranteed to produce is more Americans.

Strangely enough, he never targets gays, even though many of the songs of this era were written and/or performed by gays and the lyrics to many of the songs he objects to could apply equally to a gay or straight relationship.

Noebel's books are a must read for anyone wanting to amass a list of the best (or at least the most intriguing) sexual, psychedelic and political songs of the era. He thoughtfully explains exactly what drugs are being referenced in which songs, and provides lyrics. Search on "anti-rock" for more information about this religious subculture and its curious beliefs.