Dr. Pellmar:

I just finished reading your group's book on addictions, Dispelling the Myths about Addiction: Strategies to Increase Understanding and Strengthen Research (1997), http://www.nap.edu/books/0309064015/html/index.html, and reviewing your consultants and advisors. I also reviewed your group's directives on intellectual independence. For the sake of brevity I will state my objections to the workings of this august group, not as criticism, but rather in terms of unconscious intellectual and scientific bias. You have the foxes guarding the hen house. The same people who have been instrumental in misunderstanding and misperceiving addictions for the last twenty or so years are being used to critique the current problems in this field. This is obviously impossible. They are an inbred group who can't possibly see their conceptual biases, prejudices, and intellectual shortcomings. This problem is epidemic in addictionology. It is also why we currently are in such a mess with addictions of all sorts. It is a perspective problem perpetuated by the old-timers teaching the newcomers in the field the same old stuff and then expecting these newcomers to come up with new ideas. This is impossible due to an orientation problem. The field is going in the wrong direction and will continue to do so until reoriented by new minds and a new perspective. Let me explain.

I am an addiction theorist coming from an entirely different orientation and direction from your group. I have read the same literature and scientific material your group uses to arrive at its concepts on addictions but come to completely different conclusions. One reason for this is that when I began my search for an explanation and conceptualization of addictions I had no particular biases on how the human brain works. I started from scratch. As I traveled my path of discovery I began at the beginning, the brain, rather than at the end, the addiction. I began with understanding the evolution of the brain which has resulted in the end result of the current human brain. I looked for the normal mechanism in the normal, non- and never to be addicted, brain that could potentially be the mechanism that through various genetic perturbations would naturally result in addictions, rather than beginning at the addiction in the addict and trying to figure why this individual would behave the way he/she does and working backwards from there. My orientation and perspective resulted in the conclusion that addictions were not diseases in and of themselves but symptoms of an underlying genetically altered mechanism (the actual disease) working in not a conscious part of the brain but an inherently unconscious part, that part of the brain that had evolved for survival reasons totally unrelated in any obvious way to addictions. Of course, all medical diseases work in this fashion, a concept that is not recognized whatsoever by your group. Thus, I have discovered the mechanism of addiction and your group hasn't. This is so not because I am smarter than they are but because my perspective was different at the outset. Your group can't see the forest for the trees because it began its search by concentrating on the trees, a search that is still being hindered by this shortsighted perspective. My search began by attempting to understand the forest in all its aspects then attempted to relate the trees, addictions, to this larger view. I found this perspective problem to be true by merely reading the book your group wrote. There are several deeply incorrect assumptions throughout the book that aren't even questioned as a source for the current difficulties in their understanding of addictions. These incorrect assumptions are stated by each of the participants in the writing of the book, showing that they are widely held and make up a basis for the prejudicial conceptualization of addictions throughout. They begin with the definition of the word addiction and are compounded from there to influence the thinking behind all the other concepts of addiction used to write the book. These assumptions distort all their thinking and, thus, their search direction and conclusions. Because of these issues and many others I leave out due to the scope of this e-mail, addictions will remain misunderstood not only by the public, but, most importantly, by the people attempting to study them from the wrong perspective as well as by the addicts, the ones being devastated by their disease. My hope and desire is to be able to interact with your group and work with them to bring to their consciousness their misdirected approach and to reorient them so they may in the future be able to influence research and education on addiction to produce the results we all desire.

Please let me know how I can do this.