Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Note on Terminolog y  xi

Prologue  1
  1  What Is Addiction, Who’s at Risk, and How Do
People Recover?  9
  2  Prescription Drugs as the New Gateway to Addiction  21
  3  Pain Is Dangerous, Difference Is Psychopathology:
The Role of Illness Narratives  39
  4
Big Pharma Joins Big Medicine: Co-opting Medical Science
to Promote Pill-Taking  55
  5
The Drug-Seeking Patient: Malingering versus the
Hijacked Brain  73
  6
The Professional Patient: Illness as Identity and a Right to
Be Compensated  89
  7
The Compassionate Doctor, the Narcissistic Injury, and the
Primitive Defense  103
  8 Pill Mills and the Toyota-ization of Medicine  115
  9
Addiction, the Disease Insurance Companies Still Won’t Pay
Doctors to Treat  131
10 Stopping the Cycle of Compulsive Prescribing  149

References  157
Index  16 7