By asking straightforward, commonsensical questions about drug use and other pleasurable activities, Stanton Peele reveals that what most people think they know about addiction—what they take to be the enlightened, scientific view—is plainly at odds with their own experiences. The vast majority of people can take or leave the same psychoactive substances that supposedly lead inexorably to pharmacological slavery. And even when people develop a strong attachment to those intoxicants, they can and typically do moderate or stop their drug use without formal “treatment.” As Peele has patiently and cogently explained for nearly half a century, addiction is not a chemically triggered disease that hijacks people’s brains but a pattern of behavior that makes sense in the context of lives and settings with few other sources of meaning. His approach not only fits the facts better than the disease model of addiction; it replaces that pseudo-medical theory’s autonomy-negating, coercion-inviting doctrines with a holistic understanding that makes room for individual choice and, ultimately, hope.
