Quotes About Addiction

Other species don't suffer like people,' he said. 'Lizards don't start to drink earlier and earlier in the day. Hartebeests don't become dirty old hartebeests. Orang-outangs don't dread redundancy. Llamas don't go through the change of life. Elderly chameleons don't fear old age and tell their bored infants: "Natural camouflage isn't what it was when I was a lad.

Back in my muddy clothes at the door of my room, swallowing pills and lighting cigarettes, wanting to sleep but not wanting to dream, thinking this'll be the day that I die, pictures of Paula waving bye bye.

The junkie derives his opioid supply exogenously; while the release of endogenous opioids in the rest of us is triggered, and not always very reliably either, by stimuli such as food, sex, exercise and social interaction. We're all still seeking the same core states of psycho-chemical well-being under one description or other.

And there's never gonna be enough money And there's never gonna be enough drugs And I'm never ever gonna get old There's never gonna be enough bullets There's never gonna be enough sex And I'm never ever gonna get old So I'm never ever gonna get high And I'm never ever gonna get low And I'm never ever gonna get old

I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy Unfortunately he is a drug addict. Fortunately he is in recovery. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is in recovery again. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is not dead.

I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully...There are millions of treacherous moments.

Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs....

Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

I would miss having Nic in my life. I would miss his funny phone messages and his humor, the stories, our talks, our walks, watching movies with him, dinners together, and the transcendent feeling between us that is love. I would miss all of it. I miss it now. And here it sinks in: I don't have it now. I have not had it whenever Nic has been on drugs. Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid - terrified - to lose Nic, but I have lost him.

At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.

It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.

trying to comprehend exactly what it is that I'm feeling. Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.

Giving cash to a using addict is like handing a loaded gun to someone on the verge of suicide.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it." Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you.

You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it.

In my first group, a counselor asked me why i'm here. he said, 'What's your problem? I said ' i'm a drug addict and an alcoholic.' he shook his head. 'no.' he said, 'that's how you've been treating your problem. what is your problem?

We deny the severity of our loved one's problem, not because we are naive, but because we can't know.

But it conveys the message that addiction is as biological a condition as multiple sclerosis. True brain diseases have no volitional component.