Stanton Peele

Dr. Stanton Peele in an appearance with Dr. G. Douglas Talbott, founder of American Society of Addiction Medicine. Watch liberal Colmes attempt to destroy Stanton's reputation!

An October 2007 appearance on Fox & Friends wherein Stanton debates the Church Lady about teaching kids to drink.

Dr. Stanton Peele's appearance on Lynn Martin's Ontario, Canada based talk show discussing Addiction-Proof Your Child.

Dr. Stanton Peele discusses the nature of addictive behavior, and the viability of the "disease model".

Dr. Peele discusses the Temperance based theology informing 12 Step ideology, and the "disease" view of addictive behaviors, as uniquely American fetishes.

Is all illicit drug "use" addictive? In other words, can people use illicit drugs recreationally? The answer to this is also obvious: the government's own National Survey on Drug Use and Health says the vast majority of users of every illicit drug (yes, even crack and heroin) do so occasionally or temporarily.

Many people are very concerned about native American alcoholism — the rate of FAS is many (30!) times as high among native Americans as among Whites. What my site is about — and I believe it applies doubly to Native Americans — is whether telling people they are born with the disease of alcoholism is helpful. I say not.

The Times runs a regular blog called Proof which engages discussions of the good and bad, the pleasure and danger, of alcohol. The current post is by Jim Atkinson, who wrote a book about drinking, then after years (decades) discovered he was an alcoholic who needed to go to AA and abstain to recover. He figures he had a natural tolerance for alcohol that led him to drink so much for such a long period that he couldn't avoid being an alcoholic. This explanation of his addiction doesn't make sense.

Nearly all lay people in the U.S. agree that alcoholism is a disease, because that's what is taught in school. But, although 90% of Americans agree with the idea, what this agreement means to them varies all over the place. This depends on personal attitudes and cultural background, among other things. Almost no researchers would simply assent to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, although some are in sympathy with the thrust of this approach.

At first blush, the NIDA seems focused on the chemical rewards produced in the brain by specific drugs, notably cocaine. But, as I announced in Psychology Today 35 years ago, this model is illusory. Addiction is not the result of a drug molecule binding with specific receptors.