Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods. A “drug-free America” seems to be a fantasyland that most people don’t want to inhabit.High: Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users asks fundamental questions about US drug policies and social norms. Why do we endorse the use of some drugs and criminalize others? W...

‘I’m the binge-drinking health reporter. During the week, I write about Australia’s booze-soaked culture. At the weekends, I write myself off.’Booze had dominated Jill Stark’s social life ever since she had her first sip of beer, at 13. She thought nothing could curb her love of big nights. And then came the hangover that changed everything. In the shadow of her 35th year, Jill made a decision: she would give up alcohol. But what would it mean to stop drinking in a...

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe DannerIn Bad News, the second installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry and profound series, the Patrick Melrose Cycle, Patrick, now in his twenties, is traveling to New York to collect the ashes of his recently deceased father.Deep in the grasp of a crippling drug addiction, he spends most of his time searching for a fix...

Leslie “Ike” Atkinson is one of U.S. history’s most original gangsters. According to law enforcement sources, he and his gang smuggled, by conservative estimates, 1,000 pounds of heroin annually from Bangkok, Thailand, to U.S. military bases during their period of operation from 1968 to 1975.The Bangkok Connection: Trafficking Heroin from Asia to the USAchronicles the story of Atkinson, a charismatic former U.S. army master sergeant, career smuggler, card shark and doting family ma...

THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO STOP SMOKING!Society's ideas and beliefs about smoking are based on misinformation and illusions, which stop us from seeing what's really going on. Learn the truth and free yourself forever!This unique book is a step-by-step guide to Allen Carr's Easyway method, showing how smokers fall into the trap of smoking, the psychology behind being a slave to tobacco and how to quit immediately once and for all. No More Ashtra...

Addiction: What's Really Going On? contains powerful true-life storieswoven together to form a tapestry filled with pain, joy, defeat, and success.The entire book is molded around Deborah McCloskey's heartfeltdesire for her clients to be free of drugs. Her counseling methods both endearedher as "the counselor to get" and locked her into a decade ofsearching for better ways to help those she felt were stuck on the merry-go-round of a methadone system. This book should be read by te...

Venturing into uncharted territory, mother and award-winning journalist Meredith Maran takes us inside teenagers' hearts, minds, and central nervous systems to explore the causes and consequences of our nation's drug crisis. In these pages we get to know the kids, the parents, the therapists, and the drug treatment programs at their best and worst. We're face-to-face with seventeen-year-old Mike, whose life revolves around selling, smoking, and snorting speed; fifteen-year-old Tristan -- t...

Upbeat, encouraging, and pragmatic, not theoretical.Written by one who "knows the ropes."Author has experienced fifteen years of interacting with an addicted child and understands the way to speak to others with the same experience.Offers the author's "twelve steps for parents."Simple, direct, heart-to-heart, but at the same time, darkly humorous.

Put relationship-centered communication at the forefront of careToday, physicians face a hypercompetitive marketplace in which they must meet unique and complex patient needs as efficiently as possible. But in a culture prioritizing clinical outcomes above all, there can be a tendency to lose sight of one of the most critical aspects of providing effective care: the communication skills that build and foster physician-patient relationships.Studies have show...

Over 80 per cent of adults in the UK use caffeine every day. But at what point, did they consciously decide to consume it daily and begin to feel uneasy if they didn't? Caffeine is a bitter addictive drug which acts as a natural insecticide. It attacks the central nervous system and makes people jittery. It fools you into thinking you are more alert. Quite simply, it's bad for you with no actual benefits. In The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine, Allen Carr addresses the difficulties coff...

Every day, huge numbers of people use drugs or alcohol for recreation, medication, celebration, stress management, social lubrication, or escape. The abuse of psychoactive chemicals touches individual lives in countless ways, and clients frequently hint in therapy sessions at problems related to substance misuse. But historically, substance abuse treatment has been regarded as a separate specialty, for which students and trainees often prepare along tracks different from those leading to l...

Risk and Resilience looks at the issue of young adults who grew up in families where a parent, and sometimes both, had a drinking problem. Alcohol-related problems are now recognized as being near the very top of the world league table of health and social problems. Since the large majority of problem drinkers are adults aged between 22 and 55, many are parents with children or adolescents in their care. In the USA alone, there are estimated to be over six million children under the age of...