WHY THIS SPECIAL ISSUE ON RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND "ADDICTION"?As editors, authors, and reviewers, we had noticed that over the last several months a fair number of articles addressing the relevance of spirituality and/or religious practice-religiosity-to substance misuser treatment had been published as well as submitted to several journals, including Substance Use & Misuse. We had been struck by the fact that these articles generally lack clarity about what spirituality, religiosity, or religiousness are, how they relate to one another, and the specific roles they might play in the prevention of, the treatment of, and the recovery from substance use disorders. Without conceptual precision, it is not surprising that attempts to develop quantitative measures of spirituality and religiousness produce results that are less than satisfying or convincing. It is noteworthy that none of these articles utilized the large and rich literature, coming from many traditions, that has explored spiritual and religious matters. It is as if behavioral scientists insist that religion and spirituality fit neatly into constructs with which they are already familiar and comfortable, e.g., that religion is purely a social phenomenon while spirituality is a relational one. To be sure, there are some behavioral scientists that have confined themselves to examining the effects of very specific spiritual and religious practices or beliefs on the ability of individuals to cope with and adapt to life's daily challenges and problems. These efforts have yielded valuable information. But when efforts are mounted to go beyond specific and discrete practices and beliefs, the enterprise does not fare nearly as well.So we decided to create a special edition of Substance Use & Misuse dedicated to the exploration of the nature of spirituality and religiousness and the relevance of these human activities to substance use and misuse. We invited behavioral scientists from various parts of the world who have worked in this area together with religious scholars and spiritual teachers to address a few simple, challenging, and difficult questions: Address correspondence to Allaman Allamani,
This point-of-view commentary explores a selected range of issues relevant to alcoholic beverage drinking and nondrinking patterns documented by the AMPHORA European study which, with hind-sight, limits its generalizability, with fore-sight are generally inadequately considered and documented and, with ordinary insight, are not likely to affect the ongoing and future behaviors of policy making and sustaining stakeholders whatever their sources of influence and whatever the levels and quality of evidence-informed data, information, and derived knowledge.
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