Welcome!

I view The Trebach Institute as a nascent new university, but I simply did not have the chutzpah to call it The Trebach University. This site, which is part of the institute, is like a university in cyberspace. Since all universities have campus stores and coffee shops, this one will also. The store will primarily stock books and other educational materials. It will also have for sale a wide variety of other goods, which might be useful to the students and faculty. The purpose of all this is to provide a service to the denizens of the campus and also to bring in funds that will be devoted to supporting the broad educational programs of the university. All of these ideas will apply to The Trebach Cyberspace University.

Some of the same basic thoughts apply to our virtual coffee shop, which is right next door to the virtual store. Campus coffee shops or, in many cases, taverns serving intoxicating beverages, provide a convenient venue for continuing spirited discussions and debates that might have started a few minutes before in some classroom. Our coffee shop will likewise provide a forum for all sorts of discussions on the most burning topics of the day.

Here is how this combination of ideas will work here. I will list books, videos, and materials that I think will be of the greatest interest to our visitors -- the faculty, students, parents, and neighbors who happen to drop by. The books that will be listed initially will be those that have most affected my thinking in the field of addiction and drug policy. These will be what I consider the classics in the field. Then I will move on to list other books on addiction and drug policy that could also be quite educational and helpful to our virtual campus residents and visitors. As time passes I will seek to highlight new books of great interest.

In this fashion, I will be able to continue my university teaching. In most of my traditional classes in the past, I would assign important books and then discuss them in classroom with the students, as well as with my faculty colleagues. This is what I will do here in the virtual classroom.

Because this is a university, its interests must be quite broad. While drugs and addiction will dominate, I will also discuss other books and materials that I believe will be of interest to our visitors. This is consistent with the notion that I view addicts as basically decent people with all the human qualities of the general population. In a site dedicated to their interests, it would be inappropriate to deal only with drugs and addiction. Here we deal with whole human beings and with all of their human concerns.

Each book or item will be listed along with a brief description or review. Those who disagree with the description or review are invited to submit comments critical of the initial review. We will publish as many of these volunteered comments as possible. If these various comments and reviews are not overly long, they will be listed on the same page with the initial review. If they start to take up too much space, we will move them over to a linked coffee shop discussion page where the debate can continue.

If you wish to order a book or other item, simply click on the hyperlink, which will take you to amazon.com where you may then proceed to complete your order and pay for the items. It is important to note that by linking to amazon.com from this site and then purchasing an item, you help support the work of this site and of The Trebach Institute in general. As an amazon.com associate site, we receive a percentage payment for each item ordered by those who click through to amazon.com from our site. The percentage is higher if you click through and order an item featured on our site.

Even if you click through from our site to amazon.com and then order a book not featured, we receive a percentage payment, although a good deal smaller. To go further, if you click through from our site to amazon.com and then proceed to order any one of the thousands of items listed for sale (a lawn mower, for example) by amazon.com and which was not mentioned on our site, we still receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Thus, you can gain multiple benefits by this process. You further your knowledge and education about matters of vital interest to individuals and society. You obtain products quickly and at good prices through an Internet pioneer, which provides excellent service. Then you provide financial support to this site and to the causes it promotes.

I will start with the books that hooked me, to coin an apt phrase, on the subject of drugs and addiction. I do not know if all of them are still in print, but will list them anyhow along with the knowledge that amazon.com seeks to find out-of-print and hard-to-find books.