I don’t believe in addition. I believe in choice. People enable drug users when they allow them to claim they don’t have control.
Why is it that a drunk can go to an AA meeting and not drink when nothing physical happens there? No one holds them down or takes a drink from their hands. Because it is a choice not to drink.
“I don’t believe in addition.”
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How do you feel about subtraction?
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I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. My son started heroin to ease back pain. He said in a week he was hooked. The drug dampens your willpower to stop and to even think rationally. He ended up in jail for 60 days, which he was thankful for because he was able to detox and take back his life. It has been 3 or 4 years of him being clean with no desire to go back. For that I thank God!!
I understand and have sympathy for addiction.
What really bothers me is this push by society to treat addicts as if they have a birth defect or cancer.
I am willing to have tax money spent to help these people. I have sympathy for them and their families.
But I get angry to see them treated as unfortunates who had as much control over their condition as someone who has bone cancer or a traumatic brain injury.
If you are fortunate enough to have never been addicted to anything like alcohol, tobacco, painkillers, or opium it would be difficult to explain so you’d understand what the compulsion to relapse feels like. In the case of tobacco, my former habit, the extreme anxiety when the effects of your last cigarette begin to wear off is genuine and physical. For months after I quit I’d have dreams about having a cigarette. For those who have quit, remaining “sober” is a day to day struggle. It may be a “choice” to start, but once addicted the craving never fully goes away. Better to pray thanks that there but for God’s grace go you than critique others for what you perceive as their weakness.
You don’t know what you are talking about, but that’s normal for “normies,” as we refer to them in AA.
If you can control your drinking, by choice, you are Not an alcoholic. That’s the definition. Same goes for drugs.
“We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking.”
Page 30, Alcoholics Anonymous
If you ain’t one of us, you don’t know what it’s like. It’s hell on earth.