On Addiction

Darin Weinberg is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes and Of Others Inside: Insanity, Addiction, and Belonging in America.

“Beautifully written and impressive in its range and scope. A profound meditation on our understandings of the meaning, nature, and experience of addiction; dazzling in its intellectual scope and quietly radical in its implications for practice.” - Gerda Reith, author of (Addictive Consumption: Capitalism, Modernity and Excess) “Darin Weinberg’s work truly shines in its capacity to cast analytic attention on the micromechanics of human behavior at the level of language, phenomenology, and interaction and on the larger social structures that shape the situations in which these occur. Weinberg delves more deeply into the fundamental nature of addiction than anyone else I’ve read and reaches a set of conclusions that will thoroughly destabilize the foundational assumptions in the field. On Addiction is a provocative, pathbreaking, erudite, brilliantly argued, and beautifully written book.” - Craig Reinarman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Sociological Perspectives on Addiction2. Freedom and Addiction in Four Discursive Registers: A Comparative Historical Study of Values in Addiction Science3. Lindesmith on Addiction: A Critical History of a Classic Theory4. “Out There”: The Ecology of Addiction in Drug Abuse Treatment Discourse5. Three Problems with the Addiction as Akrasia Thesis that Ethnography Can Solve6. Toward an Ecological Understanding of Addiction7. Posthumanism, Addiction, and the Loss of Self-Control: Reflections on the Missing Core in Addiction ScienceAppendix. An Exchange with John F. Galliher on Lindesmith’s Theory of AddictionNotesReferencesIndexPlace of First Publication