Quotes About Addiction

people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches.

we need to approach drug addiction not as a criminal justice situation but more as a public health situation.

cruel optimism.' This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

Sospecho que todo aquel que haya querido a un drogadicto - y todo el que haya estado alguna vez enganchado a la droga - alberga en su interior el mismo impulso (...). Querrá destruir la adicción. Aniquilar esa dependencia. Asfixiarla con furia. Harry Anslinger no es sino una muestra de lo que sucede con nuestros impulsos mas escondidos cuando a uno se le da poder y licencia para matar.

heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme.

Indeed, "Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.

Until the day that "the Great Judge proclaims: / 'The last addict's died,'254 " the poem said, "Then—not till then—may you be retired.

Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.

What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,

today's flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief.

If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.

Nine million Americans--4 percent of adults--are using prescription sleeping pills, and vastly more are using over-the-counter sleep aids.

Addiction," he said, "is a disease of loneliness.

Saw a sunken army who had spent fourteen years waging war on alcohol only to see alcohol win, and win big.

Jean tells me the drug dealers he used to work for are "completely against this program. They can control people in weak states and make money from them. If I was still in the criminal milieu, they could make me a killer, I would do anything." As he said this, I thought of Chino and Rosalio. "But now? No. I am lost for them.

Life is but a collection of habits.

My life is being ruined by the internet!

Curst is the wretch enslaved to such a vice, Who ventures life and soul upon the dice.

For a while, I had this uncontrollable urge - this addiction to danger. Now I look back and I think, 'Gee, what an idiot. I was risking my life just for the sensation of it.'

Music has completely taken over every aspect of my life and ruined everything.

You can change a person's life in an instant; put him in a movie, and you start thinking differently, you want to be in another movie. It's like an addiction almost.

Both of my grandparents died of lung cancer. So I got quite a lesson in the payback later in life of smoking, and if you keep it up how bad it can be.