Self-change from alcohol and drug abuse: often cited classics

Abstract

As maintained by Toulmin [1], a certain event or condition can appear as a phenomenon — something that is problematic and needs explaining — only against the background of some inferred’ state of natural order’. This proposition is worth bearing in mind when revisiting and trying to summarize the key findings and major implications of some of the studies that have historically been most often cited in the debate over the existence, incidence, and character of self-change from addictive behavior. Admittedly, the selection of studies for the following brief review has by necessity been somewhat arbitrary. Nonetheless, it is evident that the vast majority of what may be termed the ‘classics’ in this field originated in the USA, in the 1960s and 1970s. To some extent this may be explained by the dominance, in a global perspective, of American alcohol and drug research at the time. However, the attention paid to these studies and the controversy raised by the issue of self-change may also be reflective of a cultural setting particularly conducive to making this topic stand out. Through the influence of the alcohol movement, the popular ‘disease model’ of drinking problems had by the early 1960s become an almost uncontested foundation for alcohol research as well as policy in the USA [2]. According to this model, alcoholism is an irreversible and inexorably progressive process, due to some inborn characteristics in certain people. Similarly, but for different reasons, narcotic drugs (i.e. at the time, opium and its derivatives) were assumed to have chemical properties making them capable of enslaving users, more or less instantly and for life.