I have long been bothered by an inexcusable absence among the many recovery options available to people struggling with addictions: marijuana is not considered a viable substitute.

Despite all the myopic tripe you often hear about how someone kicking a substance addiction must abstain from all psychoactive substances, some...

For a while, Oxycodone offered an option for opiate users - essentially, it was akin to medically prescribed heroin. Someone could get an oxy script and, rather than use it "properly", crush up a pill and do a smash. Oh the horror - people misusing their prescriptions, fiends taking advantage...

The other day, a couple of teenagers approached me. With a liquor store right beside us, they asked if I would purchase them 12 coolers. This does happen on occasion (and, yes, I decline). Now and then it occurs to me that I have yet to be approached by a...

In October of last year, I wrote an article for the Huffington Post titled Tough Love is a Joke - Let's Start Enabling Drug Addicts Everywhere. Unsurprisingly, not everyone liked the piece. In the article, I explained that most (maybe all) harm reduction efforts could fall under the heading 'enabling',...

There are so many ways to address the issue of stigma, and those of us working in the addictions require a keen grasp of its many facets. Having experienced drug addiction myself, I should have an inside line on the meaning of it all. Yet unlike many of the drug...

Many seem to like my recently published book on addiction. Here's what I often get: "Dr. Ferentzy offers an interesting and challenging perspective ..." In such cases I will thank someone for their kind words, but then quickly counter: everything I wrote in that book is true; perspective is irrelevant....

For many years, I did go to 12 Step meetings. While that's not a secret, some are surprised to hear it given my views on addiction. I was never a believer in most of what those fellowships preached, and people in the rooms were normally aware of that. Though I...

Resistance to harm reduction initiatives, and to legalisation or decriminalisation of drug use, stems from many impulses. Here I will discuss just one: an expectation placed upon the addicted.

They are expected to live up to a conception of autonomy, perhaps liberation, the violation of which offends the sensibilities...

A woman who had struggled with substance addiction, and who also had read my book, was now involved with helping others in her field (health care) get the counseling they need.

She wrote to me about how hostile her higher-ups often got when someone chose short-term over long-term intervention....

All over the world, the war on drugs hurts, incarcerates and kills people. It is an abomination.

Over the next two decades, we will overcome the war on drugs. Historically, it will be a liberatory development for all of humanity. We will witness an end to so much unnecessary death,...

Apparently, overcrowded prisons in the UK are throwing the Conservative tough love agenda into question. Good, very good!

There are many reasons people cling to notions of tough love, as applied to addicts and to others as well. Here, I will discuss one motive.

Many object to a...

Few today would take seriously a suggestion that a woman unaware of how she envies the penises of men must be repressing the truth. Fewer still would agree that such an individual needs therapy designed to make her realise just how messed up she really is. There was a time,...

From London to Toronto, New York to Vancouver, the 'Occupiers' of capitalism are facing evictions and other challenges. Clearly, legitimate debates ensue over one's right to protest versus the rights of locals to enjoy their neighborhoods as they normally do. However, where people stand on these matters has, for the...

On November 15 of this year, I read about how the City of London Corporation wishes to evict Occupy London. Hannah Borno intends to resist such efforts. My sympathies are with her.

It was on Saturday 28 October, that I first spent a few hours at Occupy Toronto in...

As an author, activist and crackhead struggling for the emancipation of the drug addicted, I must remain cognizant of how not all addicts are the same. We have different personalities, with as many variations as can be found in the general population.

I have come to realise that in...

A Canadian inquiry into the Robert Pickton case, involving the capture and murder of drug addicted sex trade workers in the lower east side of Vancouver, has recently learned what should not be surprising: many of these women suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and rely upon illicit...

If you wish to understand the governing approach to addictions - if you wish to achieve a profound grasp - then focus your mind's eye on the ideology of hitting bottom: suffering and degradation as the purported "cure" for a substance use disorder. A woman who has been through this...

As an addiction scholar and activist, few things annoy me more than all this talk about "dependence" as a problem. I have written about this already in HuffPo as it pertains to methadone. But it's an important matter, applying to issues ranging from medical marijuana to sexual partnerships, and warrants...

The good people at HuffPo have asked me to write about this timely topic: should the UK ban all substances that mimic the effects of illegal drugs?

While I could offer an erudite response, today I'd rather keep it simple. The war on drugs has failed to stop drug...

How to explain resistance in many quarters to something like harm reduction? Anyone who opposes the reduction of harm is certainly a troublemaker, a delinquent out to mess up the lives of others. Similarly, consider drug prohibition: a horrendous policy that wastes untold amounts of money, puts millions in jail...