Question: Radical Addiction Analysis

I was wondering if there are any books or websites that offer analyses of addiction issues in a more radical context as opposed to the more traditional, "psych 101" genre?

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There is quite a range of answers to this, from a quick and dirty (but potentially quite useful) look on the web, to many weeks or even months of advanced research — depending upon what perspective you are taking on radical analyses. For a quick look, the Google Directory (under MORE on http://google.com ) seems to list possible sites - at least some leads to some non-traditional sites - under: http://www.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Health/Drugs/Illegal/
Also, the category just above it under: http://www.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Health/Drugs/ , may be of some help, though that one looks more mainstream.

You can also get into some advanced research and highly technical or theoretical studies on the web by using Google Scholar (also under MORE). For example, the search: "drug addiction" marx* gets 300+ hits in Google Scholar. You may even want to cut that down by specifying edu sites. "drug addiction" marx* site:edu gets only 40 hits in Google Scholar. To be sure, Google Scholar would appear to imply "edu" sites, but no doubt many sites it indexes are .org or .com sites that serve the academic world. Many will require payment to get into full text, so possibly adding site:edu would get you to more free ones. Also, bear in mind that Google Scholar includes "cited by" links under each title in the list of results — so these can get you to more sites that are related, but maybe use different terms than those in your search.

But if you are near a large public or academic library, you may save a lot of time by using databases like Psycinfo, Sociological Abstracts, Alternative Press index, etc. For example, Psycinfo gtes 9 hits on the search: drug addiction and radical; and 22 hits for: substance abuse and radical. In Sociological Abstracts, the search: drug addiction and cultural gets 105 hits. Many of these will have full text online — but only on site, unless you are a student/staff member, or registered user of that particular library system.

Books are trickier to find, unless you have a specific topic related to "radical". For example, the huge Worldcat database (10s of thousands of libraries around the US and many other countries) gets only one hit on the search: drug addiction radical, and 5 for the search: substance abuse radical. But drug* abuse anarch* gets 15 hits. Much more important, it is very likely that many books on "Sustance Abuse" or "Drug Abuse" could have some very useful chapters on radical interpretations. So the Google Scholar or database searches can help get you to articles, reports, and papers that mention such books.

Please let me know how this works out, so we can fine-tune this search as needed.

Thanks,

Jim Miller
U of Maryland
jmiller2 {at} umd.edu