In his new book, America Anonymous, author Benoit Denizet-Lewis follows the lives of six addicts as they travel through the ups and downs of recovery.  He uses their stories to paint a picture of a country filled with addictions - from drugs and alcohol to gambling and eating - and where the recovery process itself has become a way of life.

Denizet-Lewis got the idea for his book when he was struggling with recovery from his own sex addiction - a situation that made writing America Anonymous that much more challenging.

“I wasn’t calling back friends, wasn’t going to therapy, wasn’t taking my dog for a walk, my whole life, practically all day, was consumed with sex addiction, and you know, that is what sex addiction can look like,” says Denizet-Lewis.

“If you want to talk about what was challenging was writing a book about addiction, so thinking and reading and writing about addiction all day long, and then having to worry about my own recovery at the same time,” he says. “Having to go to my own recovery meetings, and do all the work I need to do to have a sane life, and a happy life, so a lot of days, I was like, ’this is too much addiction.’”

But the result is well worth the effort of the author, a member of the gay community and a writer for the New York Times.

In the book, Denizet-Lewis criss-crosses the country to paint a truly fascinating picture of our country and how we gain comfort in our addictions and our recovery programs.

While interview counselors and medical experts, he found a community at odds about the root causes of addiction, “We don’t agree on what we’re talking about. We can’t grapple with what is and isn’t addiction and who’s to blame, and is it genetic, and why can’t people pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

During his life, Swedish psychiatrist and addiction specialist Nils Bejerot riled many individuals in the research community with his unique views on the origins and risk factors for addiction.

While most research stated (and continues to state) that addiction is the result of a combination of personal issues and socio-economic conditions, Bejerot contended that there were five external factors that represented the most significant risk factors to drug addiction and alcoholism.

Bejerot’s Five Risk Factors:

• Availability of the substance
• The money to acquire the substance
• The time needed to use the substance
• Models of the substance being used in the immediate environment
• A “permissive ideology” regarding using the substance

What was so revolutionary (and controversial) about this theory was that Bejerot believed that entire communities could be impacted by these factors, thus creating epidemics of addiction within a given society.

Bejerot believed that it is up to a society to punish drug addiction, not through the legal system but through social means.  This, he believed, was the only way to reduce the spread of addiction.

Individuals who are suffering from drug addiction or alcohol addiction, no matter what the circumstances or root causes, need to seek help from an addiction treatment facility immediately.  Through detox, counseling and aftercare, these facilities can help the individual develop the required skills to conquer addiction.

For decades, individuals who have tried to overcome alcohol addiction have aided their cause by smoking.  Cigarette smoking represented an alternative behavior to fill the void left when that person stopped smoking.  While the dangers of smoking are well documented, it was always seen as “the lesser of two evils” when compared to alcohol abuse.

But a recent study by the American Society of Addiction Medicine has found that individuals who stopped smoking during their alcohol rehab were more likely to recover vital brain functions than those who continued to smoke during this same period.

Michael Miller, president of the ASAM is seeing some encouraging news in the way rehab facilities are handling the situation.  “I would say that over half of chemical dependency treatment agencies now talk about nicotine, encourage patients to stop smoking and provide them assistance to stop, such as with nicotine-replacement therapy or prescriptions for Zyban or Champix,” the well-respected addiction professional says. “So that’s a tremendous advance.”

If you have drinking problem, or love someone who does, contact an alcohol rehab facility immediately and get life-saving treatment from addiction specialists who know how to save lives.