Let’s all force-feed jack tardiff a lot of benzos daily until he is good and addicted, and then see how he likes when we cut him off cold turkey.
It ain’t pretty.
See http://www.benzo.org.uk/
and in particular see Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw by Prof. Heather Ashton, who ran a benzo detox clinic for a dozen years.
Getting addicted to benzos is real real easy, and kicking them is real badddd shittttt. Guess how I know that.
I think there can be such a broad range of responses in terms of the level and intensity of addiction to various drugs that communication tends to suffer. IOW, we tend to lose sight of the fact that there are geneotypes that favor certain types of dependence either by virtue of it creating a more desirable altered state or because dependence is induced more easily or both. And those are only a couple scenarios.
So someone who has been in low earth orbit for weeks on morphine due to illness or injury and has stopped cold turkey with no problems is never going to understand the oxy addict. And the social drinker will never understand the alcoholic.
Of course it’s a lot more complex. There are social, psychological and probably many unknown factors in addition to the neurochemical and genetic ones. The point is that there are a lot of unfounded and mostly unrecognized ingredients that go into our indignance stew and it’s worth reflecting on that.