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Page 1 of 2 Stanton Peele has been investigating, thinking, and writing about addiction since 1969. His first bombshell book, Love and Addiction, appeared in 1975. Its experiential and environmental approach to addiction revolutionized thinking on the subject by indicating that addiction is not limited to narcotics, or to drugs at all, and that addiction is a pattern of behavior and experience which is best understood by examining an individual's relationship with his/her world. This is a distinctly nonmedical approach. It views addiction as a general pattern of behavior that nearly everyone experiences in varying degrees at one time or another.
Viewed in this context, addiction is not unusual, although it can grow to overwhelming and life-defeating dimensions. It is not essentially a medical problem, but a problem of life. It is frequently encountered and very often overcome in people's lives - the failure to overcome addictions is the exception. It occurs for people who learn drug use or other destructive patterns as a way of gaining satisfaction in the absence of more functional ways of dealing with the world. Therefore, maturity, improved coping skills, and better self-management and self-regard all contribute to overcoming and preventing addiction.
"Addiction is a way of coping with life, of artificially attaining feelings and rewards people feel they cannot achieve in any other way. As such, it is no more a treatable medical problem than is unemployment, lack of coping skills, or degraded communities and despairing lives. The only remedy for addiction is for more people to have the resources, values and environments necessary for living productive lives. More treatment will not win our badly misguided war on drugs. It will only distract our attention from the real issues in addiction."
Stanton Peele, "Cures depend on attitude, not programs," Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1990.
Stanton's approach puts him at odds with the American medical model of alcohol/drug abuse as a disease - one which is gaining acceptance worldwide. Everything about the disease approach - separating people and their substance use from their ongoing lives, not recognizing that addiction fades in and out with life conditions, viewing it as biogenetic in origin - is wrong, which Stanton strives to show throughout this website.  The notion that drug and alcohol abuse are inevitably progressive, a holdover from the Temperance view, is one example of how modern addictionology is really moralistic and theological rather than scientific and pragmatic. The Stanton Peele Addiction Web Site (SPAWS) presents a range of novel and constructive solutions to policy, scientific, treatment, and personal problems that befuddle current approaches.
Stanton has managed to maintain his cutting-edge approaches and attitudes for more than a quarter century, involving himself in central issues of policy, treatment, education, theory, and research on addiction, drugs, and alcohol. SPAWS is replete with articles, debates, conflicts, and advice on problems that cover the gamut of drug, alcohol, and addiction policy. If you are concerned about behaviors that trouble you in yourself or loved ones, about policies towards drugs, about how people are treated for alcoholism, about whether substance abuse is genetic, about cultural variations in substance use and a thousand other current controversies, then Stanton's work is critical.
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