He is an addiction psychologist whose unabashed libertarianism clashes with the leftish sensibilities of other drug policy reformers. She is a rock critic who writes for The Village Voice and views capitalism with ambivalence. He seems to spend a lot of time online, vigorously defending his iconoclastic views against all comers. She hangs out all night in hip, grungy New York clubs. His writing style is relentlessly logical and straightforward, while hers is impressionistic and elliptical.
People are responsible for their deliberate and conscious behavior.
Marlowe, a Harvard graduate who started snorting heroin in her early 30s and continued for seven years, using it almost every day for months at a time, is no less adamant about individual responsibility. Still less can I take addiction as an excuse for bad behavior. Much of what Schaler and Marlowe have to say about addiction will be familiar to readers of theorists such as Thomas Szasz and Stanton Peele. All see addiction as a pattern of behavior that can be understood only in the context of a person's values, circumstances, and choices. In this view, addiction is about much more than pharmacology.