Why read The Ghost in the Addict?

Book cover of The Ghost in the Addict

Book description

How withdrawal distress and cravings can haunt current and former addicts, and what they can teach us about addiction and its treatments.

“The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house,” Jean Cocteau once wrote. In The Ghost in the Addict, Shepard Siegel offers a…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Ghost in the Addict as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Martin Daly

Author

Shep Siegel conducted ingenious experiments in the 1970s demonstrating that drug tolerance in rats is largely if not entirely due to Pavlovian conditioning: The experienced drug user responds to indicators that a dose is imminent with physiological counter-responses that lessen the impact of the drug. Almost from the get-go, Siegel saw the potential relevance of his research to aspects of addiction, withdrawal, and relapse in human beings, but it has taken addiction researchers decades to assimilate the implications, which are profound.
Now retired, Siegel has written a highly readable retrospective account of this story which I found utterly convincing, and…

From Martin's 3 favorite reads in 2024.