Until Chris Prentiss discovered that his son Pax suffered from drug addiction to heroin and alcohol, the thought of any type of rehab treatment was relatively foreign to him. For ten years, Chris helped Pax battle heroin in the fight for his life. Pax wanted to quit, but couldn’t and didn’t know how, which resulted in him relapsing over 40 times. Chris lived in constant fear of losing his son, never knowing from one day to the next if he would ever see him again. Pax was admitted to 30, 60, and 90-day treatment programs and rehab centers, attended endless 12 step meetings, and visited every kind of doctor and addiction specialist known to man. All they heard from the specialists in the rehabilitation and addiction field was the same sad story: “Alcoholism and addiction are incurable diseases and your son will be an addict and an alcoholic for the rest of his life.” Fortunately, they refused to believe them.

Chris Prentiss, the best-selling author of The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure and Co-founder of Passages Malibu-Addiction Cure Center in Malibu, California, set out to change the addiction treatment paradigm. The book and Passages Malibu rehab center effectually caused a wave of revealing research and influence in the alcohol and drug treatment industry. Chris explains, “In 1956, the American Medical Association (AMA) named alcoholism as a disease. Through the world today, the existing primary paradigm regarding alcoholism and addiction is not only that they are diseases, but also are incurable. We’re told that even if we were to stop substance abuse, the disease would continue and we would be drug addicts or alcoholics forever. It is that belief-based on falsehood-that is primarily responsible for the stagnation that has existed for the past seventy years or so in the treatment of alcoholism and addiction. It is that paradigm that has given birth to those two terrible and untrue slogans, ‘Once and alcoholic or addict, always an alcoholic or addict’ and ‘Relapse is part of recovery.’"

Consistent with his intention to change the rehab and treatment paradigm, Chris Prentiss wrote the book The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure in order to give others hope and share with them the freedom giving, revolutionary information that is curing people of their dependencies the world over. “Alcoholism and addiction are not diseases," says Chris. "You are not an alcoholic or addict and you are not incurably diseased. Like my son Pax, you have merely become dependent on substances to cope with underlying conditions. When you discover and heal those underlying conditions, your dependency will cease completely and forever." It was Chris Prentiss’ foresight and will to change the treatment paradigm that was the single largest contributing factor in saving his son’s life.



Today, Pax Prentiss is the co-founder of Passages Malibu-Addiction Cure Center. He is the son of the catalyst behind the new addiction treatment model applied in our rehab centers, and has just celebrated his 10th year of being free from the bondage of addiction.