Quotes About Addiction

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.

When I talk about drugs and alcohol, I'm talking about sex addiction, gambling addiction, eating addiction, throwing-up addiction. I'm not talking about mental illness.

Addiction is a symptom of not growing up. I know people think it's a disease... If you have a brain tumor, if you have cancer, that's a disease. To say that an addiction is a disease is not fair to the real diseases of the world.

I hope 'Warning: This Drug May Kill You' documentary helps to show the humanity of the people who are struggling with the brain disease of addiction because that is what this is - this isn't about bad people, this is about good people who became addiction oftentimes in the process of being prescribed medication for pain.

Any physical addiction, it doesn't matter how long they've been taking it or how full of it their body is, and addiction, would, between three and thirty days, be completely cleared from the system. Usually closer to three days than thirty days. But it is the emotional craving that must be tended to.

Marijuana is not addictive. People are the addicts and they will find a substance or a belief that will feed the addiction they need to make their day go away. Meaning one looks for a substance that allows them not to live with who and what they really are. To stop addiction we must treat the patient and stop blaming everyone and everything else but the abuser.

Running is my addiction. It's always present. I'm constantly thinking about my next run.

Facing my addiction was one of the hardest things I've had to do in my life.

Showing the addiction and unusual sexual practices are ways of just outlining a much bigger character trait.

Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.

When they were putting oil rigs up and down the California coast, the whole issue of safe energy and the addiction to fossil fuels really came into focus.

We need to take a hard look at the war on drugs and the number of non-violent offenders who end up getting their lives destroyed by going to prison. We need to look at mandatory minimum sentencing and give judges more flexibility when there are issues of drug abuse or addiction.

If friends are taking more from you than they're giving, it doesn't matter if they are in the throes of addiction. It does not matter if they are suicidal. It does not matter if they were nice to you when you were kids. It doesn't matter if you've told them things you've never told anybody else and only they can relate. If this person is draining you, this person is not right for you.

When there is no such thing as religious culture and moral education, serious social problems such as drug addiction and racism fill the gap.

I've always been very open about it. I've been very open about my addiction, about my panic disorder. But I think that transparency is what can separate you from others because I think that is where comedy is going.

We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.

Addiction is a serious desease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death.

There seems is predominantly a white person's drug addiction epidemic, so that's why you see white people in our film, Warning: This Drug May Kill You.

It's funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can't even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

To break our addiction to oil is one of the greatest challenges that our generation will have to master.

We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods. And yet paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called 'wounded healers.' " ~ Barney Livingston, M.D. (Doctors, 1989)

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

Crack in the early 1980s or mid 1980s I'm sorry is that one of the worst myth is that one hit and you're addicted for life. We saw that in 1980s and we're seeing it again with methamphetamine today, one hit and you're addicted and it simply not true, addiction requires work not the people should go out and experiment or do these themselves but the fact is that's a myth and the concern is that, it's dangerous because when people perpetuates that myths and then when young people are people actually try methamphetamine or crack cocaine and find that, that doesn't happen to them.

Drug addiction is an incredibly difficult challenge to manage on one's own. When I think of all the stories I've heard from people, the common denominator is that they all were ultimately able to find somebody who was willing to support them. Maybe it was someone they knew, like a parent or a sibling or a friend; other times it was a treatment center with a compassionate staff who didn't give up on them. That made all the difference.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

The abuse of food, alcohol, or drugs is essentially a material response to a need that isn't really physical at its foundation.. What we are looking for is pure joy rather than mere sensation, or even oblivion of sensation. Addiction is unrecognized spiritual craving.

No-strings relationships have helped cure me of love addiction. All my life I've been in long-term monogamous relationships. I had to break that pattern by not allowing myself to have a relationship for a year, stopping myself from committing to men. I haven't been celibate. I've had lots of dates and lots of sex, but I haven't been pushing to turn a date into a relationship. This has been a huge thing for me.

We can and we must do better as prolonged recovery is now an achievable result of comprehensive addiction treatment.

Twitter is a real addiction, like the color of it, the process of it.

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.

We cannot drill our way out of our addiction to oil.

Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.

A fierce and sentimental addiction to forms makes us shudder at change. It is much easier to say that the system is all right-only the people need to be improved.

Right now one in three teenagers meets the medical criteria for addiction, which is scary. I'm so driven because when I walked into rehab, I was like, "Am I still drunk? Did the guys give me the wrong address? Am I at a summer camp?" And it kills them. Deaths attributed to drugs and alcohol have overtaken all other emergency-room deaths.

A lot of addiction actually ends by age 30 - something like 50 percent of all addictions with the exception of tobacco - and I think a lot of what's going on there is that the self-control areas of the brain are finally developed enough to be able to stop yourself from relapsing or just continuing. There is a maturational aspect to it as well.

Upgrade your addictions to the status of preferences. Here's the distinction between an addiction and a preference.

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness.

Science is now documenting that it's not the objects of meditation that are important, it's the process of paying attention to them - the attending - that actually influences the organism in a whole range of different ways. The brain changes significantly enough to impact thought, emotion, and other biological functions. Today, people recognize that they're not going to find well-being from the outside, or from a pill; they're going to find it by looking inside. All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.

The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He's a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that's what I enjoy about it. It's harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can't put it on.

The stage is like an addiction. Since singing and dancing had been my dreams all this time, I fall even more into those charms every time I’m on stage. These days I get the urge to make the audience go crazy.

I once tried to give him a friendly little "drugs chat". He politely corrected me on every single fact, then said he'd noticed I drank above the recommended guidelines of Red Bull and did I think I might have an addiction? That was the last time I tried to act like the older sister.

All patients reported a loss of craving for drugs while taking large doses of Vitamin C, during detoxification. Of the first 30 carefully monitored heroin addicts, 30 successfully withdrew from their addiction with no more than minor discomfort. None of the 30 were reported to have relapsed...Similar results have been reported by other doctors...:Archie Kalokerinos.

Your addiction rate will go up if you have gambling in this area

Addiction is not just for bad people or scumbags - it's a universal disease.

As we celebrate Recovery Month, it is time for Congress to knock down the barriers to treatment and recovery for 26 million Americans suffering the ravages of alcohol and drug addiction.

Because they are human beings, addicts long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God. Like all idolatries, addiction taps this vital spiritual force and draws off its energies to objects and processes that drain the addict instead of fulfilling him.

Addiction might be redefined not as a character flaw but as a "biochemical deficit management." Our emotional habits will become an accepted factor of good health, along with slogans like "Heartache can be harmful to your unborn children."