The Good News about Drugs and Alcohol: Curing, Treating, and Preventing Substance Abuse in the New Age of Biopsychiatry

Psychiatrist Gold ( The Good News About Depression ) here reviews the origins, nature and ravages of today's drug culture--and then notes signs of its waning. He attributes this improvement to education, an increasingly aware citizenry, law enforcement and government programs (of which he, as a consultant to the Reagan-Bush administrations, is singularly uncritical). He concedes that schools share with the workplace major drug problems, and discusses the controversial issue of testing. On the medical front, he describes with special pride, and with a clarity typical of the entire book, the revolutionary techniques of biopsychiatry--notably in regard to cocaine addiction, with its focus on addiction as a mental illness which ``returns psychiatry to its origins as a medical discipline.'' (Sept.)