Stanton Peele is a psychologist who has changed the addiction field.
He has pioneered, among other things, the idea that addiction occurs with a range of experiences, recognition of natural recovery from addiction, and the harm reduction approach to addiction.
This site includes many of his widely read writings (see, for example, Why Addiction Isn't a Disease) and media appearances, including Oprah, Bill O'Reilly and Fox & Friends.
Created in 1996, this website is one of the oldest in the world. The goal then was the same as it is today: To make Stanton Peele's writings and ideas available to a large audience, for free if possible.
Please see the Online Library for a large collection of articles and book chapters written by Stanton Peele, or visit the Bookstore for his books. Stanton's Life Process Program is available as an online addiction program.
Stanton's Memoir: A Scientific Life on the Edge: My Lonely Quest to Change How We See Addiction
Stanton Peele wrote the most important addiction book of the 20th Century: Love and Addiction. His memoir is the most important addiction book of the 21st Century.
Stanton Peele has created a very different kind of addiction book—a memoir of his tumultuous career in the addiction field interwoven with his personal life story. Peele has formulated and applied (in a wide range of contexts) a conception of addiction—and its prevention and treatment—centered on a person’s life experience in their social environment. This has set him in opposition to the demonization of drugs. But he also opposes the ostensibly humane but actually disempowering notion of addiction as a disease. This wrongheaded idea views addiction as if it existed only in a person’s brain and body and not in the person’s mind and soul—and community.
Stanton’s New Book With Zach Rhoads:
Outgrowing Addiction: With Common Sense Instead of “Disease” Therapy
America’s drug scourge continues unabated, even while we pour resources into traditional disease therapy and 12-step programs. This book is about the evidence-based solutions that actually help, with practical information for parents, drug users, helping professionals, and policy-makers.
Read more about Outgrowing Addiction...
Stanton's latest work
- Addiction Is Always There—How To Keep From Drowning In It
- America’s Addiction Treatment Trap
- Ted Kennedy Was Not an Alcoholic
- Carly Fiorina Loves Addiction Treatment, But Hates Drug Legalization
- Two Approaches to Harm Reduction: Goal-Setting and Meaning
- Studies Show that Drinking Problems Are Increasing. Here's Why.
- Addiction Is as American as Apple Pie
- Karl Ove Knausgaard and James Boswell: Fellow Memoirists and Alcoholics?
- When Drug Therapies for Addiction Are Dangerous
- How I Became an Addiction Expert
- Can People Outgrow Sex Addiction?
- 12 Concepts of Recovery That Have Stood the Test of Time
- Questioning the 12-Step Orthodoxy
- Is Addiction a Brain Disease?
- Legalizing Drugs Challenges the Addiction Brain Disease Theory
- The New Recovery
- Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate People into AA
- Addiction as a Social Disease
- Non-Substance Addictions Are Key to Understanding What Drugs Don’t Do
- Alcohol and Dementia: Why the Evidence Has Been Suppressed
- A Court Rejected the Disease Theory of Opioid Addiction. Will We Listen?
- Warn That Alcohol Causes Cancer? Add That Drinkers Live Longer.
- “Mare of Easttown” and the Streaming Harm Reduction Revolution
- Reason to Raise a Glass: The Alcohol-Zero-Tolerance Project Is Doomed
- So We’re Drinking Our Way Through the Pandemic? It’s What Drugs Are For.
- Democrats Platform Arch-Enemy of Syringe Exchange on DNC Opening Night
- The Perpetual Pendulum of US Drinking Guidelines
- “The Great” Offers a Window Into a Non-Temperance Way of Being
- So Alcoholics Anonymous Is “Proven” to Work After All? Not So Fast
- Beyond Harm Reduction: Encouraging Positive Drug Use
- In Defense of the Concept of Addiction
- Disease Model Proponents Are the Climate Change Deniers of Our Field
- Joe Biden’s Marijuana Comments Fit All We Know About Him
- Almodóvar and Portman’s New Films Illuminate Love, Heroin and Addiction
- The Optimism Gap: Class-Tailored Addiction Messaging Fuels Inequality
- Elton John and Bob Weir’s Recovery Routes Are Closer Than They Seem
- Coercion Into Addiction Treatment Is Ubiquitous: Five Ways It Happens
- Yes, You Can Be Addicted to Cannabis—But There Are Sensible Ways to Avoid This
- Intoxication Has Always Been the American Way—Let’s Work With That
- “Russian Doll” Is a Case Study of Existential Recovery
- What a Breakthrough E-Cigarette Study Illustrates About Addiction
- The Reassuringly Normal Recovery of Lindsay Lohan
- How a Famous IQ Study Revealed a Key Truth About Avoiding Addiction
- Kavanaugh and the Paradox of Outgrowing Alcoholic Identity, But Not Moral Culpability
- Five Harmful Anti-Alcohol Myths and the Evidence Against Them
- In 2018, the Temperance Movement Still Grips America
- Is Addiction a Chronic Brain Disease?
- Let People Choose Their Own Drug Policies. What if we just allowed people to take drugs in a supportive social milieu that clearly signals appropriate behavior?
- I Learned It by Watching You: How Television Distorts Drug Addiction
- The Hijacking of Sobriety by the Recovery Movement
- Addicted to Brain Scans
- George Washington: Boozehound
- Government Says You Can’t Overcome Addiction, Contrary to What Government Research Shows
- Philip Seymour Hoffman Was Taught To Be Helpless Before Drugs
- I'm Single-Handedly Preserving the World's Wine Cultures - Any Help Out There?
- Shocked, Shocked
- Impeach Democratic Presidents Bill
- The Search for Mental Illness and Addiction in the Brain, Part III: The DSM-5 War Over What Being Human Means
- The Search for Mental Illness and Addiction in the Brain, Part I: The Disappointment of the Human Genome Project
- AA is Ruining the World
- Two Sick Men
- Love and Addiction, Part II: Amy Winehouse
- A Brief History of Disease Theory and Harm Reduction Treatment in the US
- Addiction Prevention: Can Your Child Avoid Addiction?
- When and How Do You Help Crazy People?
- How to Talk to Crazy People II: The Continuum from Normal to Crazy
- How to Talk to Crazy People
- How American Psychiatry Misled the World and Ruined Mental Health Worldwide. Life Process Program Blog.
- Dr. Stanton Peele on Addictive Habits. Jack Hirose & Associates Vimeo Channel, January 20, 2020.
- This is what it means to express your values. Life Process Program YouTube Channel, January 10, 2020.
- Stanton Peele and Jack Hirose Discuss Addiction, Trauma, and the "Life Process Program". Life Process Program YouTube Channel, January 23, 2020.
- Stanton Updates Love and Addiction. Life Process Program YouTube Channel, January 2nd, 2020.
- What is Love Addiction? Life Process Program YouTube Channel, January 1st, 2020.
- Addicted Parents as Presidents. Can people with twisted relationships with their children run the country?
- Redefining Addiction. I. Making Addiction a Scientifically and Socially Useful Concept. International Journal of Health Services, Volume 7, Number 1, 1977. pp. 103-124.
- The Addictive Effects of Drugs Are Above All Culturally Determined. The Influence, December 1, 2014.
- My hostile breakfast with Gabor Maté. Substance.com, July 2014.
- Author of Resisting 12 Step Coercion: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA and NA. Hidden Truth Show, December 3rd, 2018.
- Seven Addiction Myths You're Sold. Presentation held at Western Region (Ireland) Drug and Alcohol Task Force, November 13th, 2018.
- Five Harmful Anti-Alcohol Myths and the Evidence Against Them. Filter, September 25, 2018.
Stanton’s 50-Year Addiction Report Card
Stanton began working on Love and Addiction (which was published in 1975) in 1970. In these forty years he has predicted a remarkable number of addiction trends. By now it is clear that the way in which Stanton has reframed addiction for the past four decades – sometimes facing extreme opposition – has been prescient. Addiction is not a consequence of taking drugs and drinking. Rather, it arises from the way in which these and other compelling activities fit into people’s lives and meanings.
