Connect
← Return to I feel incredibly hopeless.
Discussion
Comment receiving replies
Continuing to question, not to argue, I'm thinking hopes are addicted to cigarettes. It may kill some after decades and decades of smoking. Others must have their glass of wine at dinner. They're not alcoholics but they've got to have it, so I call that an addiction. I'm thinking that there are addictions that don't have the same terrible outcomes as meth and heroin. So do you believe that becoming addicted to a drug that makes your life better and is given under medical supervision is still a very negative thing?
Replies to "Continuing to question, not to argue, I'm thinking hopes are addicted to cigarettes. It may kill..."
Columbia univ professor Carl Hart(?) author of Drug use For Adults essentially tells us that drugs do not have to become what is called dependency-leading to what is an unhealthy habit; people can responsibly enjoy it and carry on with their normal lives.
Personally I've never been dependent on neither cigarettes nor alcohol (beer). Some time I have two bears over two consecutive days and other times not one in a whole week or two.
Essentially, such 'pleasures' are in the same category as cakes, sports betting or lottery games, even compulsive sex and shopping. It's Deficit of Healthy Pleasures -- of buoyant friendships, challenges of finding a new insight into a social problem, delicious healthy foods and restful sleeps, Sprinkle that with capacity to wonder in this life of ours on a solitary planet in a vast expanding universe and I have enough pleasure for a week. This is the antidote for addictions of all kinds. Alcohol, drugs are just the mediums-of-transitory escapes.
Here's a piece in the Times about pain, by an accredited professional and writer: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/opinion/pain-crisis-opioid-addiction.html
Connect
A person who "has" to drink wine occasionally is not an addict. Opioid addiction is not equivalent to nicotine addiction. See online the Washington Post's expose of Purdue Pharma. This company's family of owners misled doctors into overprescribing Oxycontin.