That’s leaving a lot out. I don’t deny that depression can be difficult and I’m happy you found a process that works for you, but it’s not that simple. Even with depression. How long did it take you to establish that cycle? How much support did you get when you were gaining your footing? What happens if that support breaks down at the start of one of your depressive cycles? I’m not saying that you should drop your method, I’m saying that more than choice had a hand in stabilizing yourself into a position of control.
I also suffer from episodes of depression. I power through them without any medications. I don’t expect anyone else to be able to do this and I don’t judge those that can’t achieve my effects using only their minds. Everyone’s situation with depression is different.
Now, with drugs…well, they short circuit your decision making abilities. Even the most ubiquitous ones, like alcohol. What is the first and foremost rule about a person who is drunk? They have impaired judgement. Now mix that impaired judgement with addiction, in which your own thought processes (even when stone sober) are telling you that it’s totally cool. You’ll quit tomorrow, man. You’re totally in control. You’re doing this BECAUSE you’re in control. You can stop any time you want to.
I once talked to a guy who was telling me about his years of alcohol addiction. He said that he never thought he was that bad. Why? Because he could always look around his bar and see someone worse off than him and go “I’ll quit before I get THAT bad.” That’s what you face in drug dependence. And it’s not some random Bruno Ponce Jones telling you this, it’s inside your own head. You can resist the bullshit of others. It’s very very hard to resist your own brain’s bullshit.
Smokers or other addicts who die at 60 or younger cost the system *much *less money than someone who lives until their 80s or 90s and dies a drawn-out death from natural causes (like cancer, dementia, loss of mobility leading to fractures/expensive surgeries/electric wheelchairs).
No, that’s what being born privileged and lacking an addictive personality is.
If you hadn’t had an immediate family member with drug problems, you wouldn’t feel as strong about drugs as you do. Most people don’t grow up with an anti-drug PSA for a sibling. I’m really sorry that you had to deal with that loss, but you can’t assume that everyone has undergone the same experiences and will have the same perspective as you do.
Pardon my bluntness, but it’s pretty white of you to assume that there is a social stigma against drugs for every person everywhere. At the end of the day, you either have sympathy for addicts or you don’t (and yeah, you don’t). The actual drug–not to mention its legal status–doesn’t factor into it. If you hadn’t had a brother with drug problems, you might have tried them someday yourself. Even in this country, there are subcultures where drugs are a done thing. If you’d grown up a black kid in gang territory, with older siblings who were all gang members or dating gang members, and parents who were perennially absent or neglectful, you’d have a very different social perspective on drugs from a *very *young age.
By it’s nature addiction is a disease of denial. And progression.
That means that any repeated use of any addictive substance, if you are prone to addiction, puts one at risk for crossing the line from social user to addict.
If you ask a recovering addict when he crossed that line very few are able to pinpoint when exactly that was. The denial works against recognizing the progression.
We agree…I didn’t say it was EASY, and like mental illness, addiction can seriously screw up your ability to make decisions (as can alzheimers, diabetes - basically any disease that affect thought process - even pregnancy). I’m just making the point that addiction is not the only disease where compliance in a behavior is a success factor for maintenance.
If that was your point, I missed it, hit a road out barricade and kept the throttle pinned while going off a cliff.
It is amazing, though, that people will yell at a diabetic for eating a whole cheese cake when they don’t understand what was going through that person’s mind when they did it.
I know what the AMA says. I also know that diseases are something that happens to you, not something you do to yourself. All Hoffman had to do was say no to the first time. It’s not like somebody sneezed on him and he caught teh durgs from it.
Bottom line is plain and simple: doing drugs is stupid. It runs the risk of killing you every time you do it, and in Hoffman’s case, it did.
Yeah, actually it does. It boils down to black and white. Stupid does drugs, for whatever reason. Smart doesn’t. I have no doubt that Hoffman knew that doing heroin was dangerous. Ask yourself why on earth it is possible that an intelligent person would do it in the first place while they know it’s stupid and potentially lethal. And the answer comes up, every time: duh, they are stupid.
Actually, if you look at the research (which, by the way, is apparently beyond 99.9% of the 'Dope regulars when it comes to addiction), higher IQ people do more drugs.
So, now that you have been shown that you are factually incorrect, are you going to retract? I doubt it, as you seem to be so wedded to your ignorant view point that you won’t ever admit you are wrong.
Wellnow, Clothahump, I find your position extraordinarily simplistic, short-sighted and, well, wrong. By your argument, no one should ever drink alcohol even once, or smoke even one cigarette…and that might be consistent with your views (are you teetotal?). But it also means no one should ever skydive, ski, ride a motorcycle. No one should ever take prescription painkillers. No one should ever eat refined sugars. It lends itself to a big ol’ reductio ad absurdum.
But…smart and stupid are not mutually exclusive. Rather, smart people are not immune to stupid choices. Some of the smartest people in the world have done terribly stupid things. Not even his fiercest detractors can deny that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law grad, is a damned smart guy; not even his fiercest supporters can deny he made some stupid-ass choices.
Stupid choices do not make a stupid person. When extremely smart people–demonstrably smart people–do things that seem really idiotic, maybe there’s something more going on than merely “they’re dumb.”
I don’t know that I lack an addictive personality. Almost everyone that I am immediately related to has been addicted and suffered problems from it. I may lack it, maybe I got lucky. Or maybe I take personal responsibility and choose not to ever even try the stuff once that I may get addicted to. And maybe alcohol could be a super addictive substance for me but I choose not to let that happen, and I make a conscious choice not to drink quite frequently, even though I easily could.
It’s a silly argument to get in because basically it comes down to the fact that because I haven’t shown any signs of addiction to anything so far, or for the things like alcohol or marijuana that I have tried, that I’ve never gotten addicted, it proves I don’t suffer from the disease of addiction. But it certainly feels to me like when I do drink alcohol, I could easily get addicted to that feeling.
Also, I was way anti using drugs long before my brother fucked himself over, so it’s very presumptive of you to say otherwise. And even after he messed himself up with meth, and after my father tore our family apart because of his drinking, it didn’t stop me from trying alcohol and drinking it responsibly, or trying marijuana on a couple of occasions after doing lots of research on it.
And finally, I am not “anti drugs” as you say I am. I think drugs should be legalized, and all the money we spend throwing drug users and dealers in prison should go to funding rehab clinics and other programs to educate people about drug use and abuse.
That being said, I don’t have any sympathy for anyone who chooses to use hard drugs and get addicted to them. No matter what social circle you are in and no matter how much peer pressure you face, it is extremely common knowledge how bad cocaine, meth, heroin etc is for you. I’ve been “lucky” that I got to see addiction ruin my brother’s life and my parent’s marriage, to serve as an example. But even if someone doesn’t have those personal examples, there are still tons of public examples of celebrities dying from OD, alcohol problems, etc.
Anyone who does not know this is literally too stupid to live.
We tried to save Hoffman. We told him that these drugs were addictive and deadly, we tried to make it impossible for him to find anyone to sell him the drugs, we threatened him with prison if he took them. We did everything we could to stop him going down this path, and he spat in our faces. And now he’s dead.
Yeah, you got lucky. I am similarly lucky, in that I have an addictive personality and am descended from a long line of alcoholics. But I’m not addicted to anything illegal or substantially-harming (caffeine, formerly tobacco). I’ve never tried illegal drugs beyond weed. I don’t think it’s a sign of character, it was just dumb luck. I, like you, have honestly never been tempted to try cocaine or meth or etc. So resisting their appeal was never a struggle for us, and thus no personal victory over such substances can be claimed.
I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Fortunately for you, people possessing boneheaded opinions are allowed to live.
Everyone’s addiction starts differently but I have to admit that this made me laugh…bad decisions at 21??? 25???. The addict voice in my head is sneering* “lightweight”.*
I was a drug addict from the time I was 8 or 9 years old, I think. I didn’t start actually taking drugs until I was 13 but up until that time I read everything I could find about drugs and I knew that I would be taking drugs as soon as I was old enough to get my hands on some.
In my case it was a combination of a couple of things…years of associating alcohol and drugs with happiness and security from a very young age…watching my parents relax and become happier and more loving after they had a drink or two, seeing how their pills made them seem more settled and secure and made their problems go far away and getting a sip of their beer when they were in a good mood…of these during that delicate stage of childhood when the brain is developing pleasure and reward pathways.
There was also an incident when I was very young (8, I think) involving 3 glasses of wine and a big spoonful of paregoric ( 1 glass of wine and the paregoric was administered by my parents who didn’t like waiting for us to fall asleep on Christmas Eve), I snuck the other 2 glasses of wine. It might be tempting to someone with no personal experience with addiction and recovery to dismiss this as “making a bad choice” but that is awfully simplistic.
It took over 40 years for me to associate this incident with my drug use but I feel it was instrumental. I want to make clear I do not use this incident, my background or the disease model of addiction as an excuse for my past. I was fully responsible for my own actions then and I am fully responsible now.
I don’t have a lot of patience with folks that use “addiction is a disease” as an excuse for their behavior but, South Park episodes aside, not a lot of addicts do. But the disease model of addiction is the only thing that comes close to working if you want to cure an addiction.
Telling the addict they are stupid and telling them to stop isn’t going to work, anymore than telling the guy with OCD to just stop counting cracks in the sidewalk.
The only thing that stands a chance of working are the routines of behavioral modification found in recovery programs which address the screwed up neurological pathways that come with addiction.
And I really don’t expect anyone that hasn’t “been there” to understand this but I’ve never really understood them either having inhabited a different world for most of my life.
Yes, but most people, upon hearing your story, immediately recoil and freaking out about saving the children and abuse and all of that other stuff. I try to avoid that.
I would actually opine that most people self-medicate with legal drugs and won’t touch illegal drugs - caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, and so forth.
Yeah, you should just take the medication all the time. I’m the same way; or was the same way. I hated the idea of having to take the meds all the time. But the whole spiraling out of control, having to get your act together enough to get your ass back to the doctor, beg for a new script, and then wait another month or more for it to kick in really really sucks. I’m an addict: an antidepressant addict. Some brains just don’t work right unless you supply them with the right chemicals.
Unfortunately, for me, one or the side effects of anti-depressants is anxiety. Doctors are not nearly as generous with anti-anxiety medication, though, as they are with anti-depressants. Because they’re “addictive”, they’re bad.
You don’t really know what’s going on in someone else’s brain. It’s easy to ascribe your own success to your special will-power or whatever. But you don’t really know.
“I once had a charley horse, and walked it off. Now I tell every one with a broken leg, they should just power through it.”
He was stupid, of course. Except when he wasn’t. Then he was brilliant. Except he was stupid. That should clear it up. It’s black and white, after all. It even boils down to it.
If people only do drugs because they’re stupid, then people only skydive, or drive fast, or ski, or bungee jump, or ride motorcycles, or a hundred other things, because they’re stupid.
People do drugs for the same reason they do all those other things; because it’s fun.
