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About our Lending Library

The 3 south bay SMART Recovery Meetings in the South Bay (San Jose Monday & Wednesday, and Los Gatos Friday), run a Netflix-style lending library out of the meetings. It basically works like this:

A number of the books to the right are a part of our lending library. If you are interested in borrowing one, come to any of the above-mentioned meetings on Mon-Weds-Fri. Ask any meeting facilitator about the book you are interested in, and we will procure it from our lending library, and bring it to the next meeting. Just give us a small cash deposit for the book, and keep it as long as you need to read it. Whenever you want you can swap it out with any facilitator for another book in our lending library. When you're done using our library we will refund you your deposit.

We feel this is a very useful service to offer and encourage our local SMART Recovery member to take advantage of this.

Books that are not listed as "Available in Lending Library" are still good reads and we recommend them, all books have links to online booksellers for purchase.

 
Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease
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Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease
Herbert Fingarette

Fingarette aims to refute evidence that alcoholism is a disease. Rejecting the terms alcoholic and disease, he points out that many "heavy drinkers" do not experience craving and/or loss of control, can engage in controlled drinking, and have spontaneous recovery. He also notes the variable success rates of medical treatment programs. Ultimately, Fingarette states that heavy drinking is dependent upon a host of situational factors. The heavy drinker is not "a passive patient who will be treated by an expert . . ." but an individual capable of exercising control and assuming responsibility. The weakness here is that alcoholism and heavy drinking are in fact different entities; in discussing alcoholism there is room for both a disease and a situational model.

Barbara J. Powell, Veterans Administration Medical Ctr., Kansas City, Mo.