Thinkin' Drinkin' : From the Teen Years Forward: a Rational, Safe, Worry-free Approach to Lifetime Alcohol Use or Abstinence

While describing and even celebrating some of the many benefits of drinking wine, beer and spirits (hard liquor) in moderation, Richard Thatcher's Thinkin' Drinkin' also shares an abundance of ideas and scientific evidence that, when taken together, add up to a cautionary tale about careless drinking. The book is informed by Thatcher's own troubled, early, and long-sustained experience with alcohol and his subsequent success at getting the problem under control. In addition, he brings a wealth of professional expertise to his writing task.

Dr. Thatcher draws upon various aspects of that accumulated knowledge to inform and provide guidance to help teens and young adults establish enjoyable, safe, worry-free approaches to drinking. These approaches can be readily adapted to any healthy lifestyle and can become good habits that last a lifetime. The author firmly believes that, if widely adopted, those "good habits" will save an enormous amount of heartache, emotional and physical injury, and many thousands of lives.

Richard Thatcher, BA, MA, and PhD, is a sociologist, social worker, and social planning consultant. He has worked for several decades in the fields of mental health and social services and community health planning. As a counsellor he has focused a good deal of his attention on substance abuse and behavioural dependencies. Dr. Thatcher is the author of Vision Seekers: A Structured Personal and Social Development Program for First Nations' Youth at High Social Risk (2001); Deadly Duo: Tobacco and Convenience Foods-The Other Substance Abuse Epidemics Afflicting the First Nations and Inuit of Canada (2001); and Fighting Firewater Fictions: Beyond the Disease Model of Addictions in First Nations (2004). A licensed professional social worker in private practice and a certified clinical sociologist, he is now semi-retired and lives with his wife in a converted school house in the rural village of Craven in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.