Dr. Walter Ling is a professor of psychiatry and director of the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Lee Ann Kaskutas is the director of training at the Alcohol Research Group, National Alcohol Research Center in Berkeley, Calif. Her focus is in non-professional treatments such as self-help groups, peer support, social networks, spirituality, and education on the effects of alcohol consumption.

Sarah Zemore is an associate scientist at the Berkeley, Calif.-based Alcohol Research Group who studies social disadvantage and the role of ethnicity, race and socioeconomics in substance use, substance abuse and treatment.

Dr. Linda Hyder Ferry is a professor of medicine at Loma Linda University’s School of Medicine and Public Health in Loma Linda, Calif., who is doing research on spirituality and recovery from addictions, specifically from nicotine addiction. She is the founder of the Foundation for Innovations in Nicotine Dependence (FIND).

Chris Prentiss is co-founder of Passages in Malibu, Calif., an eclectic, holistic substance abuse treatment center that claims to have a cure rate exceeding 80 percent. Prentiss developed his individually based approach by dealing with his son, who was addicted to heroine, cocaine and alcohol for 10 years. Prentiss recently published The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A […]

Victor Davis Hanson is a fifth-generation Californian, a farmer, a classicist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (Encounter Books, 2004), in which he argues that California is being transformed by illegal immigration from Mexico. Contact Hanson through the Hoover Institute’s public affairs office.

Wayne Cornelius is a distinguished professor emeritus of political science and U.S.-Mexico relations at the University of California at San Diego and the director emeritus of the university’s Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and is co-editor of Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Save Our Selves, or Secular Organizations for Sobriety, was founded in North Hollywood, Calif., in 1985 as an alternative to AA. The largest secular sobriety group in the world, it has 100,000 members, including believers who want to keep religion separate from recovery as well as atheists, secular humanists and non-Christians. It respects diversity, welcomes skepticism […]

LifeRing Secular Recovery International in Oakland, Calif., was founded in 1999 as a secular alternative to AA. LifeRing does not subscribe to any particular theory of alcoholism/addiction but is held together by a common commitment to abstinence.