Mark Cunningham posted a link to this piece . . . Drug Addiction and the Open Society . . . to his Marknosis email list and asks what the implications might be for hypnotists, particularly those dealing with the addiction project. Obviously, there’s a controversy here but it’s not quite so out of touch as some might believe. Whether the presuppositions of the status quo or the revisionary deconstruction are correct, the fact remains that hypnosis can be effective in helping folks with addictions break free. It is silly to believe that addiction is all powerful and impossible to beat, there are way too many counter examples of folks freeing themselves from an addiction through simple will power let alone through more formal processes. Likewise, it is also silly to believe that it is merely media hype that hard drugs are addictive via chemical dependancy mechanisms. There is too much non-culturally biased evidence to the contrary. Some of the so-called hard drugs are certainly portrayed to be much harder than they are and some so-called consumer drugs are quite costly in human social terms (marijuana is practically benign when compared to the damage caused by alcohol or tobacco – two drug products that we tend to pretend are not drugs). As to hypnotists, the processes are the same and the success rate is always higher when hypnosis is part of the process of working with addictive personalities (regardless of addiction) than when not.