Alfred R. Lindesmith
| Alfred R. Lindesmith | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 3, 1905 Clinton Falls Township, Steele County, Minnesota |
| Died | February 14, 1991 (aged 85) Bloomington, Indiana |
| Fields | Sociology, Criminology |
| Institutions | Indiana University |
| Alma mater | Carleton College, Columbia University, University of Chicago |
| Known for | Advocacy of a medical approach to drug addiction. |
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Alfred Ray Lindesmith (August 3, 1905 – February 14, 1991) was an Indiana University professor of sociology. He was among the early scholars providing a rigorous and thoughtful account of the nature of addiction.
Lindesmith's interest in drugs began at the University of Chicago, where he was trained in social psychology by Herbert Blumer and Edwin Sutherland, earning his doctorate in 1937. His education there was a mixture of the analytical and theoretical, a balance that would later appear in his drug studies. The work at Chicago involved research with interactionist theory, including the research of Chicago's Herbert Blumer, emphasizing the idea of self-concept in human interaction.
Lindesmith's work on drugs began with his questioning of the nature of addiction in a 1938 essay entitled "A sociological theory of drug addiction". This paper appeared in the American Journal of Sociology and involved in-depth interviews with 50 so-called addicts.
As this work progressed, it developed into a full theoretical and empirical account of the nature of opiate addiction, culminating in his book Opiate Addictions in 1947 (republished as Addiction and Opiates in 1968).
What Lindesmith developed was an account of opiate addiction that (1) distinguished between the physical reactions of narcotic withdrawal and its psychological (phenomenological) experience, and (2) described the relationship between these two phenomena and addiction. Addressing the question of why regular users of opiates do not necessarily become dependent or addicted, he found that, while continuous opiate use does cause many to experience physical withdrawal, the impact of withdrawal on the likelihood of dependence and addiction is not certain. Lindesmith's "addicts" revealed this, in part, as did general reports from individuals who, despite regular use of opiates, failed to become habitual users, stressing "the advantage of attributing the origin of addiction, not to a single event, but to a series of events, thus implying that addiction is established in a learning process extending over a period of time."
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