Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is not a book for addicts. This is a book for friends and family of addicts who want the addicts' actions explains through a zero-blame lens focused on the lowest common denominator of the addict community. I found the first half, which focused on psychology, very interesting. I found the bit on epigenetics especially interesting and relevant. Then Mate spends several hundred pages proposing government housing, free drugs for addicts, and safe injection sites. He never proposes who will be paying for this. Surely not those of us who struggle with addiction every day but still manage to live very productive lives. He doesn't suggest how to pinpoint what in one's past led to addiction-prone personality and he does't even begin to suggest what to do now as an adult in order to begin to move on. He relegates the addict to methadone maintenance and government housing. His lens is understandable given his very narrow band of experience. But not all of us are so decrepit that we crawl to your office in a state of psychosis begging for a script. We walk among you. We are you doctors, lawyers, and financial advisers. Mate tries to find common ground by calling himself an addict. He is addicted to purchasing classical music CDs... And while he acknowledges that this is a "white-glove" addiction, it is still an insulting comparison. Tell me, Mate, have your compact discs landed you in the hospital and in prison? Have you lost weeks of memory holed away in your attic with the stereo on? Should have just left that bit out, in my opinion. Finally, he does not address the plethora of existing treatments that themselves involve substances but that are proving effective every day. Psilocybin is controversial. Fine. But not even Ibogaine?