As predicted, Gene Heyman's book on addiction is raising hackles in the scientific community, the Toronto Star reports. Heyman's criticisms of the dominant addiction-as-disease paradigm center around his contention that for all the pull addiction exerts on one's decision-making, addicts still make a choice to use or not to use. In support of his argument, Heyman cites research that demonstrates how addicts respond to new information and various incentives to quit. Indeed, the fact that the majority of addicts do quit, and that many do so without recourse to professional treatment, Heyman says, is evidence that their addictions do not produce the unequivocal compulsion to use that the disease model implies.
||| Addiction: A Disorder of Choice is out now.
