Search Close Icon

Life Process Program Blog

Articles relating to Drug Addiction.

Recovery Nation: America’s Addiction Recovery Movement is a Black Hole

read more
Therapy and Non-Therapy Options for the Emotionally Distressed (It ain’t brain science!)

The New Yorker designated its July 10-16 edition as “The Therapy Issue.” It pointed out a strange anomaly for our time. We are dedicated to mental health treatments: “If our current moment has a defining impulse, it’s the drive...

read more
Exploring Non 12-Step Addiction Therapy Options That are Affordable and Effective

Cognitive-behavioral therapy. The entire class of non-medical, non disease treatments is called cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT. CBT grew out of behavior therapy, which initially consisted of rewarding approved behaviors and punishing undesired ones. It was opposed to Freudian or...

read more
Five Examples of What “Public Health” Can Mean for Drugs — and for drug users

How we conceive of public health in relation to drugs is crucial for the policies we adopt and invest in and the success of their outcomes. Drug policy reformers often describe their project as being the removal of drug...

read more
The Evolution of Harm Reduction in America: How the disease theory stopped progress

The American Dream: We can bypass human consciousness, lived experience and intentionality so as to cure addiction medically. Alcohol: Colonial America to Mary Pendery Antiquity through American Colonial Period. Psychoactive substances were not identified as special objects capable of...

read more
“Is it Wrong to Ask Your Partner to Stop Smoking Weed?” | Dr. Stanton Peele Responds

  Hi Dr. Peele, I’m a long-time follower of your work, and have been reading about Ariel’s experience. I can relate to so many of the comments in this article, and I was going to just post my own...

read more
Dealing with “Triggers” and Avoiding Relapse

The Life Process Program approaches everything as a life journey, that is as a process. LPP doesn’t see an individual “triggering” thing or event “causing” you to relapse. If you move your life in a positive direction, you will...

read more
7 Rules For Incorporating Natural Recovery From Addictions of All Kinds

It might seem uncomfortable for helpers to acknowledge that most people recover without treatment. But we at LPP feel the opposite is true: that seeing change occur naturally around us helps all of us to change. Thus at LPP...

read more
Are cannabis stores a good thing for society?

Dear Stanton, I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions about the prevalence of cannabis stores. I disagree with the point of view often expressed that says “legal” = “benign”. Just interested in you (and Zach’s) thoughts on...

read more
Bono and Richard Harris: Irish Connectedness and Harm Reduction

Two Irish superstars who have led very different lives each illustrate the power of local connection in dealing with alcohol At the end of his interview with Norah O’Donnell in the pub in the Irish village where he grew...

read more
Diseasing of America*: We Are Addicted to Disease Therapy

The transfer of mental health from the family and community to the medical system is regarded as a modern miracle. It is an unmitigated disaster. In the proceedings of a 1988 conference in which he and I both participated,...

read more
How to Detect Bullshit (From George Santos to Lessons in Your Own Life)

You don’t have to fact check George Santos to know he’s lying  The Peacock series “Poker Face” stars Natasha Lyonne as a superhero with a special power: the ability to detect bullshit. You can do the same without having...

read more
Overcoming Generational Trauma: “The Book of Manning” as Child Manual

   *  *  * The universal theme of trauma as the cause of addiction and much else has been broadened to include generational trauma. This phenomenon gives the 2013 ESPN series “The Book of Manning” new visibility and significance....

read more
Matthew Perry’s Memoir (Accidentally) Suggests that NATURAL RECOVERY is Possible

 *  *  * We are walking a razor’s edge in reviewing Perry’s memoir. We risk upsetting AA evangelists and the anti-12-step crowd in one review.  On one hand, AA’s “Big Book” thumpers will hate that we have no patience...

read more
Lindsay Lohan Gets Normal: So Can You with the Life Process Program

There are two ways of viewing how people emerge from addiction: the “recovery” route, where people fight an “illness” forever, versus the natural, developmental one. In the latter case, the person progresses naturally by maturing and gaining a sound...

read more
The Dangerous Myth of Drug Overdose: Shifting focus from the drug to the user’s life

 * * * “Drug overdose” deaths are one of our largest killers. From the overdose perspective, a naive user dies due to taking a single unexpectedly powerful dose of a drug, usually an opioid. But this scenario is a...

read more
Is America’s Drug Policy Genocide?

 * * * Minority and deprived populations’ death rates are increasing precipitously. Covid and drugs have been a major focus for this spate of deaths. But the cause runs deeper. The latest bad news is “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls...

read more
Prosocial Harm Reduction – Pro COMMUNITY Drug Consumption Sites

We face a crossroads in harm reduction. The concept has been widely deployed. Yet many object to it — including progressives who should be our biggest backers. Here’s the solution. * * * The Biden Administration’s Harm Reduction Background...

read more
The American Brain Disease Cult: When Prophecy Fails

After devastating data have shown that America is leading the world in a failed approach to combating mental illness and addiction, Nora Volkow comes out firing. *  *. * When Prophecy Fails What to do when you stake your...

read more
How American Psychiatry Misled the World and Ruined Mental Health Worldwide

For a half century, at least, American psychiatry and its fellow travelers have been cheerleading a descent into madness. We stand on the threshold of advances in the biological sciences so relevant to psychopathology that one can look forward...

read more
Quinta Brunson’s Love Addiction and Recovery

Quinta Brunson licked the toughest addiction— with purpose. Quinta Brunson—creator, writer and star of ABC’s Abbott Elementary—has written something of an addiction manual in her 2021 memoir, She Memes Well. In all of Brunson’s work, she reckons to have...

read more
How to Think Like a Moderate Drinker

An interview with a fictional newscaster I often fantasize about having an honest conversation with the type of news correspondent (virtually all of them) who believe addiction is a brain disease— that some are genetically predisposed to become addicted...

read more
Four Ways To Prevent Over-Sensitive Kids: Fostering Resilience

Can a child feel too much? Can they take their concern for others, and the state of the nation and the world, too far? Congressman Jamie Raskin had a monumental year in 2021. As a progressive representative from Maryland,...

read more
“Bruce” Is Mental Illness and Psych Meds

Does Bruce Springsteen symbolize creativity, engagement, and superseding early roots? Instead, for some he symbolizes mental illness and requiring psychiatric medications to live.   Bruce Springsteen’s Legacy If it were possible, Bruce Springsteen is having a “moment” in the...

read more
WebMD Lists 15 Bad Things Alcohol Does! (My Response)

The American medical establishment hasn’t progressed one iota beyond “This is your brain on drugs.” The esteemed medical website WebMD featured a piece “How Alcohol Affects Your Body” listing 15 items.  Guess how many of them were positive? I...

read more
Back to the Future: The Solution for Addiction Chaos Is Ancient

We are emerging from the Dark Ages of Drug Policy by recognizing that drug use and addiction are not the same thing. That is, drug use does not inevitably lead to addiction any more than an addiction requires drugs...

read more
Why Addiction Can Be Difficult to Overcome (and why you will still succeed)

It can be difficult for some people to hear about how so many people drink or take drugs without problems, or becoming addicted. Or, on the other hand, to learn how many overcome addiction in the course of time,...

read more
Trapped in a Disease: The New Cuckoo’s Nest

Britney Spears is the map of the future The documentary Framing Britney Spears revealed the story of how a youthful female singing-entertainment star (now 39) has been under a guardianship arrangement since 2008. The basis for this arrangement was...

read more
The Life Process Program Approach to MAT and Harm Reduction

The Life Process Program’s “MAT Empowerment Model”  MAT stands for medication-assisted treatment. This is the use of medications to assist recovery from addiction. Harm reduction as it relates to substance use means improvement, or recovery, while continuing to use...

read more
How To Get Over Addiction in Ten Life Steps: The Ian Powell/Kilter Grips Story

Ian Powell, co-founder (with Jackie Hueftle) of the US climbing gear firm, Kilter Grips, has a long story to tell about addiction, which he did for BBC Business News. A rock climber and gifted designer, Powell co-founded eGrips in...

read more
What Is It with Painkillers? A response to Prof Jamie Coleman

Prof Jamie Coleman, in an article published on the BBC website, has a solution for the painkiller (or opioid) crisis — a crisis that is particularly virile here in the US, where going on a million people have died...

read more
VIDEO: Drugs Do Not Define Addiction, with Stanton Peele

Our Life Process Program’s founder and creator, Dr. Stanton Peele, Ph.D. spoke to a group at The Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust on March 29th via teleconference called Drugs Do Not Define Addiction. The topic is one...

read more
Stanton Peele & Jim Breslo (Hidden Truth Podcast): How to Fight Forced Participation in AA and NA

Stanton Peele: Author of Resisting 12-Step Coercion: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA and NA. One of the country’s foremost experts on addiction joins Jim Breslo (Hidden Truth Podcast) to explain that we focus too much on the...

read more
Drug Policy – Ask Stanton

Should physicians prescribe narcotic substitutes? Can my son’s marijuana use be therapeutic? Tell me about needle-exchange programs and drop-in centres

read more
Jenn’s experience with NA

Last week we wrote to tell you how several readers are using the comments in the blog section of our website as a forum for sharing their experiences. In the following extract, Jenn shares her experience of escaping from...

read more
Pills, Heroin and Street Drugs: What you Need to Know

Painkillers aren’t Addictive like Heroin, Right? It seems like it should be clear. Prescription painkillers are something you take for “polite pain,” like for a backache, or post-surgery; many keep them and use them when a shoulder acts up,...

read more
Overdose and Other Drug and Addiction Myths

Everything you believe about drugs/addiction is wrong. EVERYTHING. It matters. I.  Drug Overdose Tom Petty died from, according to the New York Times headline, an “Accidental Drug Overdose.” Here’s the coroner’s list of the drugs found in Petty’s system: fentanyl,...

read more
The Solution to the Opioid Crisis

Everyone has a solution for the opioid epidemic. Here’s a real one. Here’s what we must do to improve our addictive situation In 2016, the American Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, announced in a new report on addiction, as though...

read more
Painkiller addiction is almost nonexistent, according to government data

Painkiller addiction is almost nonexistent, according to government data. News item:  The Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, headed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, was released.  It declares, in the most lurid terms, that we are...

read more
The Myth of Addiction as “Equal Opportunity Destroyer”

The worst of the disease theory is that it says everyone is equally susceptible News Item: New county-level data from the CDC highlight the extreme geographic variation in opioid prescription rates, with some areas showing average morphine equivalents per capita 10 times...

read more
Anthony Bourdain’s Updated Addiction Report Card

He may smoke, he certainly drinks and, good God, that 60-year-old is trim!   This post is in response to Anthony Bourdain’s Addiction Report Card by Stanton Peele Anthony Bourdain is the worldly gastronomical traveler with an addictive past. ...

read more
Our Drug Death Epidemic Is Worse than Ever But everything we say and do to combat it accelerates the problem.

“I have a theory, of which Maggie Hassan is but one example: We don’t really care whether people become addicted, or whether they die. We only care about maintaining our cultural blinders. All of our energy goes into that...

read more
Our Drug Death Epidemic Is Worse than Ever

But everything we say and do to combat it accelerates the problem. The American Ethos and Drug Addiction and Death An odd moment occurred on MSNBC when the host of “All In with Chris Hayes” interviewed liberal New Hampshire...

read more
Are Addiction and Mental Illness Really Brain Diseases?

The two primary (New York) intellectual organs, the New York Review of Books and The New York Times, have recently featured two powerful cultural icons saying exactly opposite things. Marcia Angell, the first woman editor-in-chief of the New England...

read more
The Health Care Crisis and the Addiction Crisis Are the Same

Donald Trump was elected by a white underclass that is resentful, suicidal, and addictive, and whose existence is declining rapidly. The most noted element in the current health-care debate is how the Republicans’ White House champion, along with the...

read more
Reducing Drug Deaths: Heroin Injection By Appointment

The next step in addiction Tx is assisting those addicted to heroin to inject The United States has been stymied in reducing drug-related deaths, which have continued to grow even in places where Naloxone and other anti-overdose medications have...

read more
Subject: INSPIRED. A plea from a dissident

Subject: INSPIRED. A plea from a dissident Dear Dr. Stanton Peele, I am in much need of your advice. I am nervous sending this to you because, 1: I am anxious and have been most of my life; 2:...

read more
Normalizing Drug Use

We have entered an era in which drug use is widespread, almost ubiquitous, and yet at the same it is viewed as unmanageable and uncontrollable. We need instead to accept and to regulate drug use. Several recent key writings in...

read more
The Good and the Bad of Trauma Theory in Addiction

Why the Life Process Program doesn’t focus on trauma—it doesn’t work! Trauma theory has come to dominate addiction practice.  It is commonplace to hear assertions that all addiction is due to trauma, or the converse—no one can escape the...

read more
That Time When a Devastating Attack on a Seminal Controlled Drinking Study Set Us Back Decades

Recent reports on the harm reduction movement portray its rude health—yet simultaneously, a catastrophic event could at any point challenge its growing acceptance. To me, the situation recalls a disastrous confrontation that long negated a hugely promising development, before...

read more
Like Bad Drug Laws, the Disease Theory of Addiction Ruins Lives: We Must Target Both

Disease Theory of Addiction The disease theory of addiction underpins punitive and abhorrent drug policies—but in fact, its negative impact is evenworse than this. Recently, two notables on an addiction theory list to which I used to belong debated...

read more
Anyone Can Escape Addiction

Earlier this year, Maia Szalavitz, my fellow Influence columnist and an old comrade-in-arms, released her masterful book, Unbroken Brain, one that displays skills I only wish I had, and that I try to emulate. In it, she’s kind enough...

read more
In Addiction, We Must Constantly Reassert That Research Beats Experience

A piece on The Influence last week by Patrick Hilsman, a member of this publication’s editorial team, strikingly recounted his experiences—both pleasurable and harrowing—with heroin, to which he was once addicted. He contrasted these personal experiences with some received...

read more
Seven Things We Must Understand About Addiction to Undo the Mistakes of the Past 40 Years

When Archie Brodsky and I were writing Love and Addiction in the early 1970s, a medical resident told us, “Oh, we’ve established what addiction was long ago.” It turns out, that wasn’t true. In 2013, DSM-5, the most recent...

read more
Sometimes I Worry That AA’s Media Fan Club Won’t Be Enough to Secure Our Addiction-Free Future

We heard last week how Arianna Huffington, running her eponymous publication, bravely fought against criticism of 12-step programs in a report on heroin addiction in Kentucky that was eventually nominated for a Pulitzer. Should that surprise us? Of course...

read more
Addiction Is Always There – How To Keep From Drowning In It

We are recognizing that addiction is a regular part of life, and it scares the hell out of us. When I published Love and Addiction with Archie Brodsky in 1975, we received catcalls from my fellow faculty members at...

read more
Does the Word Addict Cause Harm?

This week on Talk Recovery, Dr. Stanton Peele discusses: ‘Does the word addict cause harm?’ Listen to his response.

read more
People Conquer Addiction With Their Minds

Americans are dead set on finding a magic-bullet solution for thier addictions. Experts in the field, including pharmacologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists—adding their voices to the 12-step movement—are all clamoring to be recognized as the true messiahs leading us...

read more
Affordable Community Based Drug Addiction Treatment

In line with Andrew Tatarsky’s and Shaun Shelly’s current entries, I would like to hear more of the thoughts on making drug treatment more available, and accessible on an as-needed basis. ” Howard Josepher Thanks for inquiring, Howard. The...

read more
When Drug Therapy for Addiction Is Dangerous

Relapse is common for drug treatments—but worse is when people attribute their recovery to them. This article discusses three kinds of drug therapy in addiction: Substitution or maintenance of a less harmful version of the same addiction (e.g., Suboxone,...

read more
Why We Need to Normalize Drug Use in Our Society

After the disastrous misconceptions of the 20th century, we’re returning to the idea that drugs are an ordinary part of life experience and no more cause addiction than do other behaviors. This is rational and welcome. Drug use was...

read more
Skill at Substance Use

We don’t ordinarily think of substance use as involving skill.  But the concept of skill at substance use is essential in treatment, harm reduction, and prevention. The Pre- and Modern History of Substance Use There are two large framing...

read more
We Need a Conceptual Breakthrough in the War on Drugs

Among the misconceptions fostered by AA and the disease theory of addiction is the idea of “hitting bottom” — that there is some objective state beneath which no human being will go. The same is true in our misconceptions...

read more
The Meaning of Addiction Has Changed — Addiction is Not a Characteristic of Things

Writing as editor of MedPage Today, the redoubtable George Lundberg* confidently (and briefly) declared: “All drugs are habit-forming, but only a subset of psychoactive drugs can produce psychological and physical dependence, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms when taken away, the usual...

read more
Have You Ever Noticed? People Take Drugs

Let’s see, I have three lead-ins to this post.  Lance Armstrong — American icon and seven-time Tour de France winner (when I was coming up, Americans weren’t even competing in the Tour) — has given up his fight against charges that...

read more
Mindfulness and Harm Reduction in Addiction—The Caffeine Example

This post is a response to What Caffeine Really Does to Your Brain by David DiSalvo Whenever people can be shown how any mood-affecting substance affects their brains, it becomes easier for them to comprehend the thing can be addictive. Which...

read more
Marijuana Is Addictive – So What?

The Stanton Peele Addiction Website, January 7, 2006. Research increasingly shows that intensive marijuana use often meets the technical requirements for addiction (or dependence). Analysts use this as evidence of the need to maintain the drug’s illegal status. But...

read more
If Gambling, Games, and Sex are Addictive, What is Addiction?

Gambling Addiction DSM 5’s announcement that the psychiatric diagnostic manual will, for the first time, call something addictive that doesn’t involve substance abuse — gambling — has opened the floodgates. It is intriguing to consider how gambling was placed in this...

read more
Are a “Sensible” and a “Scientific” View of Addiction the Same?

Calling gambling and game addictions brain diseases is a stretch. DSM-V’s announcement that the psychiatric diagnostic manual will, for the first time, call something addictive that doesn’t involve substance abuse—gambling—has opened the floodgates. It is intriguing to consider how gambling was placed...

read more
Addiction Is All in the Delivery

That the DSM-5 substance-use-disorders committee has decided one thing that doesn’t involve a psychoactive substance — gambling — can be addictive has set off a debate about what is the most addictive non-drug experience of all. Leading candidates are love/sex/porn/Internet/food —...

read more
iPhones, Games and the Addictive Experience

Addiction is all in the delivery system That the DSM-5 substance-use-disorders committee has decided one thing that doesn’t involve a psychoactive substance—gambling—can be addictive has set off a debate about what is the most addictive non-drug experience of all. (One of...

read more
Why People Get Better

Novelty-seeking used to make people alcoholic, now it makes them creative. The large population studies from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (called NLAES and NESARC) that have found three quarters of ever-alcoholic people become stably sober, and a majority of those...

read more
The War of the Addiction Worlds – Four incompatible views of addiction

Four incompatible views of addiction fight to capture America’s consciousness This post is going to be unusually brilliant, even for me. In it, I review four factions warring against one another for our consciousness about addiction. “Chronic Brain Disease” = the dominant view...

read more
Proof That Treating Addictions With Drugs Doesn’t Work

For some time, nicotine replacement therapy (nicotine patches and gum) has been the sine qua non of pharmacological treatment for addiction. NRT’s pedigree is unassailable — if smoking addiction is due entirely to maintaining cellular nicotine levels, then replacing nicotine through...

read more
The Opposite of Mental “Disease”

People outgrow and control mental illness, the opposite of a disease I often write about how — as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has only recently rediscovered – most alcohol and drug dependent people recover on their own. (See my...

read more
How Did We Discover Sex Addiction?

We have discovered sex is addictive—why now, with what implications? As the author of Love and Addiction (in which I discussed sex addiction in 1975), I have kept a close view on the societal vision of addiction in re sex. I pointed out in that book...

read more
There Will Never Be a (Useful) Addiction Vaccine

And here I thought all that addiction vaccine talk had been put to rest in 2009. Yet, there it was staring me in the face at the top of the on-line edition of The New York Times: An Addiction Vaccine:...

read more
This is How People Quit Addictions

Our fellow HuffPost blogger, Laura Harvey, has written “How I Broke All the Rules — But Still Quit Smoking.” “I was a smoker for 28 years. This month I celebrated one year smoke free. Even though I tried to quit...

read more
Why Medicine for Addiction Will Make Our Problems Worse

The New York Times last week announced a new medical approach to addiction taking hold in America’s medical schools, where addiction medicine is becoming a recognized specialty. Although the Times welcomes this development (it was inevitable), it is doubtful it will improve America’s addictive...

read more
The Meaning of Addiction: Is Eating Addictive?

The idea that addiction has a “meaning” seems strange — haven’t they discovered “addiction” in a PET scan in a laboratory at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)? It’s either there or it’s not, right? Not actually. Here’s...

read more
The Top Ten Problems with the “New” Medical Approach to Addiction

The New York Times announced on Sunday the new medical approach to addictiontaking hold in America’s medical schools, where addiction medicine is becoming a recognized specialty. Although the Times welcomes this development (it was inevitable), it is doubtful it will improve America’s addictive...

read more
Harm Reduction: The Only Realistic Approach to Substance Use and Recovery

Psychoactive substance use — certainly including alcohol and psychiatric medications, on top of illicit drug use — is nearly universal in Western societies. It is becoming more, not less, so, and it’s beginning at younger ages. American public policy...

read more
Are Addiction and Mental Illness Really Brain Diseases?

The two primary (New York) intellectual organs, the New York Review of Books andThe New York Times, have recently featured two powerful cultural icons saying exactly opposite things. Marcia Angell, the first woman editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and now...

read more
Why Do We Now Have a Prescription Drug Abuse Problem?

Everybody’s talking about it — the fastest-growing drugs of abuse are prescribed painkillers, synthetic opiates like OxyContin. “Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Abuse Epidemic” is the lead story at the Web site of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control...

read more
Living and Dying With and Without Harm Reduction

I had the unusual experience of having been, within the last couple of weeks, in a room depicted in The New York Times webcast, which covers three stories around the world each day. This was the injection room in Vancouver. The New...

read more
The Best Prevention Research Tells Us Harm Reduction Is the Best We Can Hope For

Following are five key points about addiction prevention programs and the current research, the best ever conducted on the question, and the three key results of the research and three conclusions from this (see Effectiveness Bank Bulletin , February 25, 2011):...

read more
Everything You Need to Know About Sex and Addiction: The Outsider’s Manual

I. The myth of neurochemical addiction Among American’s mass delusions are that we have either discovered the neurochemistry of addiction or are on the verge of doing so. In fact, we have decisively disproved this possibility, and are inexorably headed in...

read more
People Should Quit Drinking and Smoking – But Can They?

You Shouldn’t Smoke Or Drink Allen Carr is an Englishman who wrote bestsellers about quitting things (he died in 2006). Most famously, he wrote the all-time bestselling book about quitting smoking, “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” Carr later...

read more
Is Marijuana Addictive? Does It Matter?

As the effort by drug policy reform advocates to achieve their holy grail — the legalization of a formerly illegal substance (marijuana) in a leading-edge state (California) — was within reach, former Clinton Drug Czar, General Barry McCaffrey, bad-mouthed...

read more
AA Isn’t the Best Solution: Alternatives for Alcoholics

Building on an essay in Wired magazine by Brendan Koerner, New York Timesconservative columnist David Brooks lauds to the sky AA and its founder, Bill Wilson. Both Brooks and Koerner point out the worldwide spread of AA (although it is limited mainly to the...

read more
Drug Courts: You’d Think They Would Work

A new Scottish study found something surprising. Scotland has recently adopted American-style drug courts, where the court works with drug offenders to arrange for treatment in place of incarceration. The expectation was for effective sentences of drug treatment and testing orders,...

read more
Cures depend on attitudes, not programs

Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, March 14, 1990 About one-third of the $10 billion-plus that President Bush has requested for waging war on drugs is targeted to pay for treatment and prevention programs. That’s double what it was as recently...

read more
Will Sex Addiction Be in DSM-V?

The fight over the new psychiatric manual, DSM-V, has escalated. The conflict is due to an underlying flaw in the manual’s conception. Rather than tracing human activity in terms of its impact for people’s lives, it instead attempts to...

read more
What’s the Most Dangerous Addiction?

I previously answered the question, “What’s the hardest addiction to quit?” It turns out that the same addiction is the most dangerous. Michael Jackson died at age 50, and long term prescription drug abuse is suspected. In other words, it often takes...

read more
The Toughest Addiction to Quit

Headline: Former Washington Mayor Marion Barry has been arrested and charged with stalking a woman.  Remind you of any other politicians? When Marion Barry’s arrest was announced on various news media, each recapitulated how Barry had previously been videotaped –...

read more
Can love be addictive? Ask Mark Sanford – or his wife

Mark Sanford’s wife has made clear just how far “gone” her husband, the governor of South Carolina, was over his affair with his Argentinean lover.  Vice President Biden should consider appointing Jenny Sanford director of the new National Institute...

read more
Why We Can’t Legalize Drugs

We can’t legalize drugs – despite political, economic, even survival pressures to do so – because of deep underlying American mindsets against drugs, the two primary ones being that we believe continuing drug use is, or causes, a disease,...

read more
Real Recovery Requires Life-Building

Addiction is like the tail wagging the dog, or person, with the tail being a habit that dominates the person’s whole life. Addiction therapy concentrates on the tail – cutting it off in abstinence therapy, making it smaller in...

read more
AA’s declining dogmatism

Although it might seem surprising to say so, responses to my post “Addiction Myth #4: moments of clarity lead ONLY to AA” actually indicate a decline in the dominance and dogmatism of AA in the 21st Century. When I entered...

read more
Progressives War over Drug Czar

Some progressives want to change our approach to drugs to recognize that there will be continuing use, and to accept the need to protect users through providing them with clean needles, non-injectible drugs taken orally, medical care, good diets...

read more
Readers Quiz: Why Are Americans So Kooky About Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll?

I asked a British man what struck him about the United States. The thing he found most amazing about America was how many towns didn’t allow restaurants to sell alcohol, and that some towns allowed no alcohol sales at...

read more
Why Harm Reduction Makes Sense: These Three Things I Know are True

Harm reduction is the concept of reducing the dangers of drug and other substance use, including the damage due to addiction. While this seems perilously radical — opponents claim it encourages drug use by “sending the wrong message” —...

read more
The 7 hardest addictions to quit – love is the worst!

Here are – in reverse order of difficulty – the seven addictions people find hardest to quit. Cocaine. Cocaine is an episodic-use drug. It is one moreover associated with certain lifestyles – at one time (if not now) people...

read more
The Disease of Having Too Much Sex — Addiction is real, it’s just not a disease

Dr. Joseph Beck, psychiatrist and addiction specialist, wrote an article for the Sun-Times News Group titled, “Addiction doesn’t always involve drugs, alcohol.” I confess to thinking, as the author (in 1975) of Love and Addiction, “I’m glad someone got psychiatry...

read more
Open letter to Nora Volkow

(Nora Volkow is the neuroscientist who directs the National Institute on Drug Abuse) Dearest Nora (and thanks for the Passover card), My last two posts at my blog for Psychology Today – “The End of Addiction” and “End Alcoholism – Bomb Spain” — have...

read more

If you think the Life Process Program is for you get started with us today.

About the Program