Six Questions: Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., Talks to the Alliance

Social psychologist Dr. 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 distinctly non-medical approach treats addiction as a general pattern of behavior that nearly everyone experiences in varying degrees at one time or another. This puts Peele at odds with the American medical model of alcohol/drug abuse as a disease – one which is gaining acceptance worldwide. Peele believes that 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.
 
The Stanton Peele Addiction Web Site presents a range of novel and constructive solutions to policy, scientific, treatment, and personal problems that befuddle current approaches. Dr. Peele’s new book, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, hits stores on July 27.

1. How did you get involved in drug-policy reform?
 
My approach to addiction – which sees many habits as having equivalent potential for doing harm – indicates that illicit drugs do not belong in a special category.  When you can become addicted to sex, love, gambling, and shopping, why should cocaine, heroin, and marijuana be given a legal status pegged to their being particularly addictive or harmful?  Because he recognized that my ideas supported the drug reform movement, Ethan Nadelmann invited me to join a group he had formed to propose ways to revise drug regulations – and the rest, as they say, is history.
 
2. What is your current role in the field?
 
I have shifted from my earlier days as an addiction theorist and bomb thrower – through books such as Love and Addiction, Diseasing of America, and The Meaning of Addiction – to become more of an educator and a facilitator.  Many of my early radical ideas have become mainstream, such as that addiction is not limited to illicit drugs, or to drugs at all, that reduced consumption and harms are worthwhile treatment outcomes, and that people often recover from addiction on their own – or due to minimal interventions. This was the theme of my book, The Truth About Addiction and Recovery, and my forthcoming self-help manual, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction. I now spend a good deal of time training people in skills related to brief interventions, motivational interviewing, and harm reduction.

3. What is your most memorable drug war moment?
 
On the negative side, the controlled-drinking wars of the early 1980s were devastating, when I and several others were singled out for a concerted attack again harm reduction ideas in re alcoholism. On the positive side, I always enjoyed participating in Drug Policy Foundation (now the Drug Policy Alliance) award ceremonies, because the awardees were so brave, intelligent, and constructive.  I was thrilled when, in 1994, I received a DPF award for lifetime scholarship.  Of course, that was ten years ago, and I continue to work to reverse irrational drug and alcohol policies.

4. What challenge would you most like to see the drug-policy reform movement overcome this year?
 
According to a study described in the online news and arts publication for the Twin Cities, City Pages, in an article entitled “Addicted to Drug Courts,” by Beth Hawkins, “Hennepin County’s drug court has cleared court dockets and steered a lot of people toward treatment, but at the same time it’s also allowed the county to push thousands more casual offenders into the corrections system.” The drug policy reform movement has to come to grips with – and express itself about – coercion in drug courts, rounding up more casual users, and forcing people into 12-step programs, which is an illegal violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

5. One sentence, please, that sums up your views on drug-policy reform.
 
We have drug laws and policy in play around the world, and the next Democratic administration has to move forcefully in the same direction, or else we’ll have Ralph Nader running again – and we’ll need him!
 
6. What is your advice to fellow reformers who want to be more active in the field?
 
Speak up at local meetings (especially if you live in a Republican suburb), focusing on how stupid it is to ruin a kid’s life for being caught using marijuana.