Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Preventing And Treating Narcotic Addiction — A Century Of Federal Drug Control, David Courtwright

David T. Courtwright

The Nida Brain Disease Paradigm: History, Resistance And Spinoffs, David T. Courtwright

David T. Courtwright

This article examines ‘the NIDA paradigm’, the theory that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease characterized by loss of control over drug taking. I critically review the official history of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) paradigm and analyze the sources of resistance to it. I argue that, even though the theory remains contested, it has yielded important insights in other fields, including my own discipline of history.

Mr. Atod’S Wild Ride: What Do Alcohol, Tobacco, And Other Drugs Have In Common?, David T. Courtwright

David T. Courtwright

All researchers agree that individuals can become intoxicated by and dependent on alcohol, tobacco, and other psychoactive drugs. But they have disagreed over whether, and to what extent, drug pathologies comprise a unitary medical problem. Most critically, does addiction have a biological common denominator? Consensus on this question has shifted back and forth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, physicians often studied and treated various drug addictions together, working under the “inebriety” paradigm. By the mid-twentieth century the inebriety paradigm had collapsed. Tobacco and alcohol had split off, both in the medical research community and in western popular …