The Addicted Lawyer

Brian Cuban was living a lie. With a famous last name and a successful career as a lawyer, Brian was able to hide his clinical depression and alcohol and cocaine addictions—for a while. Today, as an inspirational speaker in long-term recovery, Brian looks back on his journey with honesty, compassion, and even humor as he reflects both on what he has learned about himself and his career choice and how the legal profession enables addiction. His demons, which date to his childhood, controlled him through failed marriages and stays in a psychiatric facility, until they brought him to the brink of suicide. That was his wake-up call. This is his story. Brian also takes an in-depth look at why there is such a high percentage of problematic alcohol use and other mental health issues in the legal profession. What types of therapies work? Are 12-step programs the only answer? Brian also includes interviews with experts on the subject as well as others in the profession who are now in recovery. The Addicted Lawyer is both a serious study of addiction and a compelling story of redemption.

Pittsburgh personal injury lawyer and part-time drug dealer Jason Feldman’s life goals are simple: date hot women, earn enough cash to score cocaine on a regular basis, and care for his dementia-ravaged father. That all changes when a long-lost childhood friend contacts him about the discovery of buried remains belonging to a high school classmate who went missing thirty years prior, and the fragile life Jason’s built over his troubled past is about to come crashing down. Soon, he’s on the run across Pittsburgh and beyond to find his old friend, while trying to figure out whom to trust among Ukrainian mobsters, vegan drug dealers, washed-up sports stars, an Israeli James Bond, and an ex-wife who happens to be the district attorney. The only way he’ll survive is if he overcomes his addictions so he can face his childhood demons.

This book considers how largely accepted ‘legal truths’ about drugs and addiction are made and sustained through practices of lawyering. Lawyers play a vital and largely underappreciated role in constituting legal certainties about substances and ‘addiction’, including links between alcohol and other drugs, and phenomena such as family violence. Such practices exacerbate, sustain and stabilise ‘addicted’ realities, with a range of implications – many of them seemingly unjust – for people who use alcohol and other drugs. This book explores these issues, drawing upon data collected for a major international study on alcohol and other drugs in the law, including interviews with lawyers, magistrates and judges; analyses of case law; and legislation. Focussing on an array of legal practices, including processes of law-making, human rights deliberations, advocacy and negotiation strategies, and the sentencing of offenders, and buttressed by overarching analyses of the ethics and politics of such practices, the book looks at how alcohol and other drug ‘addiction’ emerges and is concretised through the everyday work lawyers and decision makers do. Foregrounding ‘practices’, the book also shows that law is more fragile than we might assume. It concludes by presenting a blueprint for how lawyers can rethink their advocacy practices in light of this fragility and the opportunities it presents for remaking law and the subjects and objects shaped by it. This ground-breaking book will be of interest not only to those studying and working within the field of alcohol and drug addiction but also to lawyers and judges practising in this area and to scholars in a range of disciplines, including law, science and technology studies, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies

Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of escaping her insecurity and negativity became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story of her formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Smith describes how her spiraling circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication, nurturing an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.

The book includes an examination of sources of law important to addiction and its treatment. The foundations for forensic work in professional legal testimony is explored (e.g., legal system, case law precedent, statutes governing addictions, civil and criminal procedures). The science of addiction is featured including the biology of addiction, addiction as a brain disease, responsibility vs. loss of control, development of addictions, and the role of genetics and environment. Drug testing, its uses with forensic populations, what the tests show and do not show, controversies in using tests in the general population also receives extensive treatment. Addiction and mental illness in forensic populations is highlighted for addiction treatment and continuing care. Case studies and landmark cases illustrate the role of alcohol, drug use, and addictions in legal decisions. Focused primarily on alcohol and drug addictions Case studies and landmark cases are included to illustrate the role of alcohol/drugs in legal decisions (e.g., the Exxon Valdez case) Brief overview of legal system and drug courts will be useful to clinicans, lawyers, administrators, and other professionals

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Michael Brock is billing the hours, making the money, rushing relentlessly to the top of Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. law firm. One step away from partnership, Michael has it all. Then, in an instant, it all comes undone. A homeless man takes nine lawyers hostage in the firm’s plush offices. When it is all over, the man’s blood is splattered on Michael’s face—and suddenly Michael is willing to do the unthinkable. Rediscovering a conscience he lost long ago, Michael is leaving the big time for the streets where his attacker once lived—and where society’s powerless need an advocate for justice. But there’s one break Michael can’t make: from a secret that has floated up from the depths of Drake & Sweeney, from a confidential file that is now in Michael’s hands, and from a conspiracy that has already taken lives. Now Michael’s former partners are about to become his bitter enemies. Because to them, Michael Brock is the most dangerous man on the streets. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!

Joseph W. Naus was living the American Dream. He'd survived a brutal childhood, graduated from Pepperdine Law School, and become a successful attorney. Then one night, his American Dream-life became a nightmare when his sex and alcohol addictions collided and exploded. "On Tuesday, I was a respected civil trial lawyer making six-figures. On Wednesday, I woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed charged with attempted murder...and then it got worse." Straight Pepper Diet is a book about surviving one's own wreckage. It's harrowing, sometimes hilarious, and surprisingly hope-filled.

The New York Times Bestseller What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question--and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix. One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realized he had addiction in his family. Confused, not knowing what to do, he set out and traveled over 30,000 miles over three years to discover what really causes addiction--and what really solves it. He uncovered a range of remarkable human stories--of how the war on drugs began with Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, being stalked and killed by a racist policeman; of the scientist who discovered the surprising key to addiction; and of the countries that ended their own war on drugs--with extraordinary results. Chasing the Scream is the story of a life-changing journey that transformed the addiction debate internationally--and showed the world that the opposite of addiction is connection.