Amazon.com description: Product Description: In this book, social work practitioners, theorists and researchers offer new perspectives on the meaning, role and history of addiction in our society and the construction of illicit drug use as a social problem. Some of the contributors discuss assessment tools and therapeutic programs being employed today in the treatment of addicted individuals. These papers work together to educate the aspiring helping professional and the practitioner in the field about the very complex and ubiquitous problem of addiction, while underlining the centrality of addiction as another form of the oppression addressed daily by social workers.