An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.

I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry.

The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn't make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions.

Openness is the first step toward recovery... addiction remains a secret because of the overwhelming shame associated with it.

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It’s critical if we’re going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There’s another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness.

This stigma associated with drug use--the belief that bad kids use, good kids don't, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic--has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.