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Addiction exercises enormous power over all those who are touched by it. This book argues that power and powerlessness have been neglected in addiction studies and that they are a unifying theme that brings together different areas of research from the field including the disempowering nature of addiction; effects on family, community and the workplace; epidemiological and ethnographic work; studies of the legal and illegal supply; and theories of treatment and change. Examples of alcohol, drug and gambling addiction are used to discuss the evidence that addiction is most disempowering where social resources to resist it are weakest; the ways in which the dominant discourses about addictive behaviour encourage the attributing of responsibility for addiction to individuals and divert attention from the powerful who benefit from addiction; and the ways in which the voices of those whose interests are least well-served by addiction are silenced.
List of contents
1. Powerful connections: three examples of addiction; 2. How addiction erodes free agency; 3. Addiction subordinates the interests of family members and friends; 4. Inequality in the power to resist addiction; 5. Power and powerlessness in the addiction supply industries; 6. Reasserting control and power in the process of change and treatment; 7. Facing up to the power of addiction and those who benefit from it.
About the author
Jim Orford is Emeritus Professor of Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Jim is a long-standing researcher and writer in the addiction field. Amongst his fourteen previous books are successful titles on addiction, notably Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addictions (1st edition, 1985; 2nd edition, 2001), as well as others on community psychology including Community Psychology: Challenges, Controversies and Emerging Consensus (2008). He is one of the UK's leading addiction researchers and has an international reputation. In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious international E. M. Jellinek Award for his contribution to alcohol and addiction studies.
Summary
Jim Orford argues that power and powerlessness have been neglected in addiction studies. He covers the disempowering nature of addiction, effects on family and others, social resources and vulnerability, studies of the legal and illegal supply, and theories of treatment and change.
Report
'This book brings together Jim Orford's vast knowledge of addiction research and theory and, using the unifying concept of power, it examines the multi-layered nature of how we are, at several levels, disempowered by our involvement with addictive consumptions. From the three case studies at the opening to his examples of communities reclaiming power at the end, his chapters move progressively from the individual, to families, to neighbourhoods and communities and onto the broader societal and industrial contexts that shape addictions in our lives. It is the first book on addiction I have read that thoroughly integrates so many important strands of thinking on this complex topic.' Peter J. Adams, Centre for Addiction Research, University of Auckland, and author of Fragmented Intimacy: Addiction in a Social World
