Peter Anderson, Jurgen Rehm, and Robin Room. Impact of Addictive Substances and Behaviours on Individual and Societal Well‐being. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. $54.00 pp. 256. ISBN: 9780198714002.

• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017
• Author: Taleed El‐Sabawi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.220

Book Review

Peter Anderson, Jurgen Rehm, and Robin Room. Impact of Addictive Substances and

Behaviours on Individual and Societal Well-being. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2015. $54.00 pp. 256. ISBN: 9780198714002.

Few public health off‌icials or health practitioners would disagree that the

misuse or overuse of pleasurable substances has resulted in a great deal of social

harm. The disagreement generally occurs in def‌ining the social problem of what

society often refers to as addiction, in deciphering its causal story and in choosing

a policy solution that not only appeals to constituents, but that will be

successfully implemented. Although focusing on discussions of policy solutions

and public health interventions is most common in the public health literature on

addiction, it is truly the causal stories that we tell about the social issue that

inf‌luences which policy solutions will be considered (Stone, 1998). In the book,

The Impact of Addictive Substances and Behaviours on Individual and Societal

Well-being, Anderson et. al. explicitly ask the reader to suspend the desire to

def‌ine the social problem of illicit substance use as “addiction,” but, instead, to

def‌ine the problem as the harm to individual and societal well-being caused by

addictive substances and behaviors. In their compilation of essays, the authors

also challenge common causal stories of deviance, moral failings, and even

biology, with a more complex causal story rooted in historic perspectives, societal

responses, and market forces.

In the literature on addiction, the tendency is to treat addiction as a

dichotomous variable with a number cutoff. If the individual scores above the

cutoff, then he or she suffers from addiction. If not, then he or she is free from the

stigma of being labeled an addict, but, then also doesn’t receive any treatment for

any problem use that falls below the threshold. This also has the consequence of

narrowing “societal attention to the individual level of those engaged in the

behavior, neglecting the fact that the environment in which someone lives is a

major determinant of drug use and harm” (p. vii) and inadvertently excluding

“problem use” by some subpopulations like college students and youth.

In order to combat this tendency, Anderson et. al. ask the reader to def‌ine the

societal problem more broadly—as the individual and societal harms caused by

World Medical & Health Policy, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2017

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1948-4682 #2017 Policy Studies Organization

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