Abstract
A variety of reasons have been offered as causal for the addiction of individuals to psychoactive drugs. Much of the literature offers a dichotomy of either physical attributes (medical model) or psychosocial attributes (sociological model). Neither stands alone as a satisfactory model for the process of addiction and recovery. Rather than accepting the two areas as dichotomous, another possibility is that the medical and psychosocial models instead form the structure and process of addiction. This paper examines familial substrata of addiction, that is, those underlying elements of biology, genetics, and social learning that occur in families and that contribute to the structure and process of addiction. A family-based treatment model is proposed for the treatment of addiction.