To my knowledge, this book is the only completely scientific, yet thoroughly user friendly, comprehensive professional’s guide for treating adolescent substance abusers. Dr. Ross outlines screening assessment and diagnostic procedures that accurately reflect the most important pathologic psychoemotional and behavioral features of substance abusing adolescents. He also gives an unique as well as uniquely valid, yet clinically useful explanation of unintentionally causative or enabling agents in the phenomenon of adolescent substance abuse. Consequently, effective treatment necessarily includes parents (or their surrogates) throughout the treatment process. Most importantly, Dr. Ross demonstrated the clinical use of his explanations as the basis for his practical yet highly effective way of making continual family involvement a core factor in adolescent treatment and relapse prevention. For those reasons, this book describes an efficiently effective as well as economical adolescent treatment method. No addiction therapists or counselors can consider their professional knowledge to be adequate without having carefully studied this book. Maxie C. Maultsby, Chairperson, Department of Psychiatry, Howard University School of Medicine There is a difference between a child and and an adult; and an adolescent is neither. George Ross has memorialized in his book a treatment model that works with adolescents and their families. His approach treats not just the symptoms but the root disease of chemical dependency. His approach is practical, usable, and effective. When all is said and done…it works! For me, George Ross’s approach is not theoretical. My family and child are living proof…we experienced it. Bill Oliver, Author of PRIDE’s Parent to Parent Drug Prevention Workshop