Dr. Reznicek is a clinical psychiatrist who offers radical advice for parents who want to keep their teens away from drugs: take complete control of your child's life. He says parents have all the tools they need to keep kids drug-free: clear expectations, close supervision, home drug-testing and swift consequences for drug use. He is a harsh critic of the disease model of substance abuse and drug rehab, which he says enables drug use. Rehab teaches teens that drug abuse is a brain disease and that quitting is so complicated it requires trained experts. Neither is true. The disease model also...

Alcohol, opiates, cocaine and marijuana, among other drugs, have been used and abused for millennia. Prior to the disease model approach to drug addiction, which posits that addiction is a psychological and biological problem and that sufferers are victims, societies had a workable solution: let people consume what they want, and let informal cultural controls reinforce responsible behavior. Legal sanctions were reserved for any use that affected the safety of others. Blowing Smoke proposes an approach to the war on drugs that returns us to the pre-disease-model era. Dr. Reznicek asserts that...