A Scientific Life on the Edge My Lonely Quest to Change How We See Addiction

Stanton Peele has created a very different kind of addiction book-a memoir of his tumultuous career in the addiction field interwoven with his personal life story. Peele has formulated and applied (in a wide range of contexts) a conception of addiction-and its prevention and treatment-centered on a person's life experience in their social environment. This has set him in opposition to the demonization of drugs. But he also opposes the ostensibly humane but actually disempowering notion of addiction as a disease. This wrongheaded idea views addiction as if it existed only in a person's brain and body and not in the person's mind and soul-and community.
Stanton has fought this battle for half a century as an independent scholar with no institutional position or funding. He has lived his life the same way he practices his profession-principled, adventurous, purpose-driven, and always "on the edge." He tells this tale with bold confidence and defiance about his ideas and values, yet with often humorous self-awareness.
"Stanton Peele is a true pioneer of addiction research and theory. His ideas must be reckoned with by anyone who is serious about understanding addiction."
- Maia Szalavitz, Author,
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