It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour. - Gabor Maté

Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine. (p38)

People far-flung have told me that it saved their lives, it changed their view of addiction or it made a big difference to their families... the book addresses — the origins of addiction and a sane and humane way of treating addiction of all kinds — has not become mainstream practice or awareness yet... When the book came out, we still had a federal government that was completely against supervised injection sites, for example, or the provision under observed circumstances of prescribed heroin to dependence users who needed it. We had a completely retrograde federal policy which has opened up quite a bit under the current administration.

Whereas individual people can become dislocated by misfortunes in any society, only a free-market society produces mass dislocation as part of its normal functioning, even during periods of prosperity. (p288)