“Clearly also written by someone without any knowledge of addictions.”
Addiction is binary.
Your either choose to be addicted, or you choose not to be addicted.
Addicts should not be coddled. They should be discarded until they realize the error of their ways.
If they get clean, they should be welcomed back. If not, forgotten.
Here are two points to consider:
I’ve never been an alcoholic. A friend of mine was. I am addicted to cigarettes. That’s my thing. Nicotine.
I’ve tried to quit many times over the past 22 years but have failed. Today I mark 1 week of success, which is frankly a lot longer than I thought I would. While I’m not robbing people for a fix, I can tell you that you have confused “Addict” for “Criminal Addict”.
An addiction is a real thing, and I pray for the recovery of anyone shaking an addiction. But these are human beings, and I know from suffering from addiction (Albeit not a criminal type of addiction) that the choice to begin was theirs (Mine was mine) but to quit is not an option. There are tricks and what works for one person will likely not work for another. Pray for these people are offer your hand as Jesus would offer his.
I have been confused as to why someone would start Crack. I never understood why someone, anyone, would look at the punchline of a joke and say “Yup. That’s for me!” but the truth is that Crack addicts are normally tricked into it. Be it from just a few pills to feel “different” or a full blown get drunk, pass out, and get injected (Which happens more frequently than you can imagine). Crack is the butt end of every joke, yet still people wind up hooked on it.
No one chooses to be addicted. They choose to start a bad habit, but finishing it is now out of their hands. It’s in the realm of possibility, but addiction is real. My mind goes through mental gymnastics every 5 minutes to get me to light up another cigarette. I will even take stupid events and blow them up in my head to create stress “.. .from which only a last cigarette will fix”.
THIS IS THE MEAT OF THE POST:
I had a $15,000,000 company 2 years ago. We did telecom. We had contracts, quality tower climbers and top-notch analysts and engineers. An opiate addict who sat on my executive board (Who was just a game winner kind of guy) destroyed the entire company in a single weekend. A 6-digit salary guy stole the credit cards of one of our contractors and hacked a pharmacist to send him Oxy through the mail. After years of hard work and building relationships, it was all destroyed in one weekend. I lost about $180k out of pocket and the ghost of the company still haunts me with the people who lost their paychecks and couldn’t pay bills.
He did it because he couldn’t have anyone seeing the charges on his cards, so he stole the cards of one of our contractors to get it.
So opioid addiction has had a SEVERE cost on my life, even without being the addict. But I can tell you that as an addicted person, I can understand why he did it. I don’t condone why he did it - but I can understand that his brain was doing mental gymnastics to make him think that what he was doing was the smartest thing anyone has ever done.
There is a saying, however. “A drug addict will steal money from your pocketbook and deny ever doing it. A pill-head will steal money from your pocketbook and _help you look for it_”
Pill addictions are very, very complex addictions. And yes, to maintain that addiction the brain begins to exhibit signs of damage and the addict will become so delusional that it strongly resembles a non-voluntary psychosis.