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Efforts in the United States to eradicate drug addiction fail because they are based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of addiction. In contrast, an accurate view of addiction provides strong clues about policies that can reduce its dangers. The most successful antidotes to addiction are pro-social values and behavior. A value-, skill-, and environment-oriented approach to addiction will be more effective than current medical and admonitory approaches to drug abuse. Although a values-skills-environmental approach recognizes that values are crucial in the formation and maintenance of addiction, it is actually less moralistic than approaches that view abstinence from drugs as the only healthy and moral lifestyle.

Contemporary theories of addiction of all stripes rule out faulty values as a cause of addiction. Yet evidence from cross-cultural, ethnic, and social-class research, laboratory study of addictive behavior, and natural history and field investigations of addiction indicate the importance of value orientations in the development and expression of addictive behaviors, including drug and alcohol addiction, smoking, and compulsive eating. Furthermore, the rejection of moral considerations in addiction deprives us of our most powerful weapons against addiction and contributes to our current addiction binge. The disease myth of addiction in particular attacks the assumption of essential moral responsibility for people's drug use and related behavior, an assumption that we instead ought to be encouraging.

Addiction is viewed from a range of perspectives that often seem incompatible and perhaps incommensurable. This volume presents the major visions of addiction in contemporary science and therapy, including cognitive-behavior, medical-disease, adaptive, genetic, neurobehavioral, social, learning, ego-analytic, and moral models of addiction. Although we must examine the bases of these diverse visions in order to make sense of the welter of conflicting views of addiction, it is not necessary to surrender to nihilism or relativism in response to their diversity and contradictoriness.

Both lay people and addiction theorists often explain drug abuse and addiction in terms of the pleasure the addict derives from a drug. This "pleasure principle" model does not succeed in explaining either the initiation or continuation of drug abuse or other compulsive, self-destructive behavior. Examinations of the rewards addicts report from addiction to drugs and to other involvements point instead toward a desire to modify experience by making it less burdensome or painful. Implications for how addicts become able eventually to dismiss addictive rewards are discussed.

Preface / by Tom Horvath, Ph.D -- Introduction: why we wrote this book -- Addiction as a developmental process -- The addictive experience -- Expanding life experience -- The life process of children -- Children and addiction -- Diseases, disorders and self-fulfilling prophecies -- Beyond labeling -- Behavioral addictions and what they show us -- Abstinence and harm reduction, in adolescence and recovery -- The limits to the 12-step approach -- Recovery in the real world -- Raising our non-addicted next generation -- Developing purpose, efficacy, and independence -- Overcoming addiction -- Conclusion: the American delusion -- Appendix A: Reader's exercises by chapter -- Appendix B: Parents' addiction and development manual -- Appendix C: The life process program/family program -- Appendix D: Additional resources -- Endnotes -- About the authors.

There is no simple threshold between the experience of drinking and the pleasure it can bring on the one hand and the pain and suffering caused by alcohol abuse on the other. But if we are to understand the role of alcohol in society, then at the very least we need to acknowledge the pleasure as well as the pain. Alcohol and Pleasure aims to bring together existing knowledge on the role of pleasure in drinking and determine whether the concept is useful for scientific understanding and policy consideration