“Beautifully written and impressive in its range and scope. A profound meditation on our understandings of the meaning, nature, and experience of addiction; dazzling in its intellectual scope and quietly radical in its implications for practice.” - Gerda Reith, author of (Addictive Consumption: Capitalism, Modernity and Excess) “Darin Weinberg’s work truly shines in its capacity to cast analytic attention on the micromechanics of human behavior at the level of language, phenomenology, and interaction and on the larger social structures that shape the situations in which these occur. Weinberg delves more deeply into the fundamental nature of addiction than anyone else I’ve read and reaches a set of conclusions that will thoroughly destabilize the foundational assumptions in the field. <i>On Addiction</i> is a provocative, pathbreaking, erudite, brilliantly argued, and beautifully written book.” - Craig Reinarman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Sociological Perspectives on Addiction
2. Freedom and Addiction in Four Discursive Registers: A Comparative Historical Study of Values in Addiction Science
3. Lindesmith on Addiction: A Critical History of a Classic Theory
4. “Out There”: The Ecology of Addiction in Drug Abuse Treatment Discourse
5. Three Problems with the Addiction as Akrasia Thesis that Ethnography Can Solve
6. Toward an Ecological Understanding of Addiction
7. Posthumanism, Addiction, and the Loss of Self-Control: Reflections on the Missing Core in Addiction Science
Appendix. An Exchange with John F. Galliher on Lindesmith’s Theory of Addiction
Notes
References
Index
Place of First Publication