The drug war that has turned Juárez, Mexico, into a killing field that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since 2008 captures headlines almost daily. But few accounts go all the way down to the streets to investigate the lives of individual drug users. One of those users, Scott Comar, survived years of heroin addiction and failed attempts at detox and finally cleaned up in 2003. Now a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso in the history department's borderlands doctoral pro...

America Anonymous is the unforgettable story of eight men and women from around the country -- including a grandmother, a college student, a bodybuilder, and a housewife -- struggling with addictions. For nearly three years, acclaimed journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis immersed himself in their lives as they battled drug and alcohol abuse, overeating, and compulsive gambling and sexuality. Alternating with their stories is Denizet-Lewis's candid account of his own re...

Allen Carr's international bestseller, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, has sold more than eleven million copies worldwide and helped to turn countless smokers into non-smokers. The Little Book of Quitting crystallizes 120 key points of the Easyway method in a concise and readily accessible format. Carr's method can enable any smoker to quit easily, painlessly, and permanently without needing willpower, suffering withdrawal pangs, feeling deprived, or gaining weight. This is the perfect pocke...

Filled with practical information for those first days of sober living, this little book:* offers newcomers advice about the program, how long it takes, and what to look for in a sponsor* provides in-depth discussions of each of the Twelve Steps and related character defects* poses common questions about AA and helping others, identifying where to find answers in the Big Book* features non-sexist language.

In this powerful memoir of addiction, prison, and recovery, a reporter and a photographer tell their gripping story of falling in love, the heroin habit that drove them apart, and the unlikely way a criminal conviction brought them back together.Books for a Better Life Award Finalist • LitHub Best Book of the MonthWhen Susan Stellin asked Graham MacIndoe to shoot her author photo for an upcoming travel book, she barely knew him except for a...

A research-based guide to controlling the destructive urge to gambleFrom Howard Shaffer, PhD, a noted expert on gambling addiction, and Harvard Health Publications comes Change Your Gambling, Change your Life, a landmark new book which explains how gambling problems are related to other underlying issues: such as anxiety, mood fluctuation, difficulty with impulse control, and substance abuse problems. Dr. Shaffer offers a series of self-tests to help evalu...

A habitual movement as common as nail-biting or toe-tapping can be the key to pulling out addictive behavior by its roots. These unconscious movement "tags" indicate the places where our bodies have become split off from our psyches. When brought to consciousness and confronted they will often tell us very plainly where our psychological suffering originated, showing us where to begin reconnecting body and soul. Christine Caldwell, a pioneer in the field of somatic psychology, has created ...

Hailed as a “clear-eyed book written with poetry and compassion” by The Boston Globe, Let the Tornado Come is the “lyrical debut memoir” (Kirkus Reviews) of a runaway child, the woman she became, and the horse that set her free.When Rita Zoey Chin was eleven years old, she began running away from home. Her parents’ violence and neglect drove her onto the streets in search of a better life, but what she found instead was a dangero...

Updated for today's health care climate, the revised and expanded second edition of this popular volume offers a thorough introduction to clinical work with this difficult-to-treat population. Providing a unique synthesis of chemical dependency and mental health models, the book articulates a framework for assessment and treatment and describes a range of effective counseling and motivational strategies for adolescents and adults. The second edition includes discussions of the latest devel...

It is high time to think sanely about marijuana.Reefer Sanity offers a solution to the long-had debate about marijuana—one that steers clear of policy extremes, challenges assumptions, and shifts the emphasis to education, intervention, and common sense.A former Senior Advisor in President Obama's drug policy offer, Kevin Sabet conscientiously examines the socio-economic consequences and the intractable "myths" concerning marijuana that essentially p...

Lucas Mann was only thirteen years old when his brother Josh—charismatic and ambitious, funny and sadistic, violent and vulnerable—died of a heroin overdose. Although his brief life is ultimately unknowable, Josh is both a presence and an absence in the author’s life that will not remain unclaimed. As Josh’s story is told in kaleidoscopic shards of memories assembled from interviews with his friends and family, as well as from the raw material of his journals, a revealing, startling portra...