Quotes About Addiction

Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention

To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved. One day, a very senior government minister came to visit the safe injection rooms, and to meet the addicts. He asked Liz: "What percentage of people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?" She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none.

We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.

The question] is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than consumption?

It occurred to me as I walked up and down those Lisbon streets that we all—the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. And now the evidence strongly suggests that when we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.

The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It

I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling—the addicted person's craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.

If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I'm an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain—not my addiction. Indeed, if she prescribes just to meet my addiction, she will face being stripped of her license and up to twenty-five years in jail84 as a common drug dealer—just

If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren't, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. "Their relative maladjustment," the study found, "precedes the initiation of drug use." Indeed, "Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.

But then I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to

In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there—while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.28

Their business model," he says, "is screen time, not life time.

Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime. Instead, all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover.

Parents beware! Your children . . . are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.

In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record. After the drug war, we will make it easier to employ recovering addicts, with subsidies—because we understand this will keep them from relapsing more effectively than the threat of being caged.

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

João believes that addiction is an expression of despair, and the best way to deal with despair is to offer a better life, where the addict doesn't feel the need to anesthetize herself anymore. Giving rewards, rather than making threats, is the path out. Congratulate them. Give them options. Help them build a life.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.

I had learned there is overwhelming evidence that depression, anxiety, and addiction are responses to deep social forces that are rising around us. For example: the less control you have over your work, the more likely you are to despair. Or to name another: as your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to feel insecure and humiliated, and therefore more likely to become depressed or anxious.

I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.

Joel Nigg] believes you can only ethically give out drugs if you are also at the same time trying to solve the deeper problem.

The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.

His goal as a doctor was always "trying to identify what happened in the past" of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life as an alternative. Now they were asking: If this is the goal of all good doctors, why can't it be the goal of government policy?

The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. The crackdown on cannabis in the 1970s triggered the rise of skunk and superskunk. The crackdown on powder cocaine in the early 1980s led to the creation of crack, a more compact form of the drug. Many drug users want and prefer the milder forms of their drug—but they can't get them under prohibition, so they are pressed onto harder drugs.