A review of the addiction treatment literature reveals a number of key findings related to current administrative discharge practices.

There are three styles of recovery initiation: quantum change, conscious incremental change and a less conscious process that sociologists refer to as drift.

Reader: I'll bet not one person in a hundred who is employed in the addictions field has any idea of the history of their profession. This is a history book that is chock full of the befuddled efforts of millions of people who have tried almost everything to get sober. Carrie Nation, The Keeley Institute, Kellogg and his corn flakes, the gold IV injection treatment, and the use of methamphetimine right down to MADD... this book details a group of people who, on their own, tried to fight addiction and support each other in their sobriety. All this without the help of the government until recent times.

Imagine a place where vibrant support groups and personal recovery assistance exist right on campus. Imagine a place where recovering students academically outperform their student peers. That place exists on the campus of Texas Tech University (TTU) in Lubbock, Texas.

Criticisms of faith-based approaches to addiction recovery continue today, leaving open the question of how such frameworks will compete with, be linked to, or be integrated with the mainstream system of addiction treatment.

New understandings of the nature of substance use disorders and their management calls for shifting the treatment of severe and persistent alcohol and other drug problems from an emergency room model of acute care to a model of sustained recovery management.

Something is reawakening inside America. People whose stigmatized condition left them alone or cloistered in subterranean subcultures are stepping into the light to tell the stories of their wounds and their redemption.

The slogan Treatment Works should be abandoned and replaced by a cluster of messages that shift the emphasis from the intervention (treatment) to the desired outcome (recovery), extol the importance of personal choice and responsibility, celebrate multiple pathways of recovery...

If the field embraces the larger spectrum of people with AOD (and other) problems within its purview (which it has), then it must significantly expand its potential treatment goals and intervention technologies (which it has not).

Are alcoholism and other addictions diseases? If so, what manner of diseases are they, and how can they best be treated? If not, then how can we understand and respond to such conditions?