Quotes About Addiction

It seemed that the problem of Americans overdosing and dying from drug addiction was being described as bad people, particularly kids, who were abusing good drugs. But Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, and I were particularly interested in finding out the stories of people and families who had been ravaged by this disease of addiction and understanding what really was happening. What we found was that, and let's not make any mistake about it, this is an epidemic of addiction.

I felt that if people understood the struggle of recovery, then some of the stigma of addiction might be reduced because the audience would understand in a palpable way that addiction is a disease that tells the afflicted, despite years or even decades of heartbreaking evidence to the contrary, that using will make things better.

Tobacco addiction sinks its claws in deeply, it's just as powerful of [sic] an addiction as heroin or crack cocaine.

But I will say that the drugs are much more ferocious then they used to be. There are people wrecking their lives with addiction, which seems much more severe.

Don't we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be... doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.

Sex addiction is a subject that should be discussed

I just think the whole disease model of addiction is crap. It's rooted in fiction and junk science.

I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, "If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I'll stay home."

The priesthood holds consummate power. It can protect you from the plague of pornography-and it is a plague-if you are succumbing to its influence. If one is obedient, the priesthood can show how to break a habit and even erase an addiction. Holders of the priesthood have that authority and should employ it to combat evil influences.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

The underlying motivation that drives all addiction is our insistence on avoiding pain. However, the pain you are avoiding is based in the past, and has nothing to do with the present moment.

Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide.

[On her morphine addiction:] I was meant to 'taper off.' At times I felt such pains as must afflict a creature while a bigger beast eats and claws at its middle. God-awful things were hiding underneath my bed, and it was no use telling me they were not there - I knew they were, and felt their dreadful ever-changing shapes.

Tennis is an addiction that once it has truly hooked a man will not let him go.

Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.

[While] my life started taking on all the problems of addiction. So that took me off into an area where relationships were absolutely impossible to handle on any real level. . . . Even communicating with other people was impossible.

Exercise is like an addiction. Once you're in it, you feel like your body needs it.

I smoke weed.It's not an addiction. It's something I wanna do. It's not smart though. It's not good for my body but I'm doing it. I'm not telling people to do it.

I had always turned it down-to me, smoking pot was absolutely the worst thing in the world. I thought of it as an addiction, and all my friends who smoked it, I felt they really needed help.

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

A staggering 63 percent of Americans say that addiction to alcohol or other drugs has had an impact on them at some point in their lives.

Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

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.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

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.

As you feel increasingly comfortable around your friends, I think it's more than fine to share the basic details of your heroin addiction with them. If they seem receptive, you can feel free to talk about it in further detail; if they seem judgmental or uncomfortable, you can move on to other topics.

No one is immune from addiction; it afflicts people of all ages, races, classes, and professions.

Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction

In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

My daughter, unfortunately, is ill, because drug addiction is an illness. She's been fighting it for years.

The end of my addiction to fame happened at the exact moment Roseanne dropped out of the top ten, in the seventh of our nine seasons. It was mysteriously instantaneous!

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

The addiction isn't your problem - it is what you use to cope with your problem.

My dad struggled with cocaine addiction, and we actually went to rehab with him too. I remember having extensive talks with him about how I was wired a certain way, how I wouldn't be able to drink and do drugs the same way my friends got to.

My greatest struggle is to coexist while watching the people I love choose less than life-supporting paths via drugs, alcohol, or poor lifestyle decisions. There is so much to life; my heart breaks watching someone held captive by addiction.

I'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.

I had better admit right away that walking can in the end become an addiction ... even in this final stage it remains a delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I recommend it with passion.

These disorders - schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction - they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are.

In 'Tarahumara' land, there was no crime, war or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn't get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: 50-year-olds outran teenagers.

Drug addicts, when they are in their addiction, are selfish.

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 have a bit of a traveling addiction, and, ah, yeah. I went to, ah, Bali this summer.

To limit yourself to a label of "alcoholic" is masochistic and false if you have awakened a deeper spiritual identity within and have come to know your true self as unconditioned pure awareness. This doesn't mean that recovering alcoholics don't have to be concerned with relapsing, they must always remain vigilant. The power of addiction should not be underestimated. This exercise in vigilance can become a spiritual tool of liberation as well. Always being aware of choosing between real happiness and false happiness is also the discrimination required to attain enlightenment.

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.

Addiction is a revolt of the soul.

Desperation precludes reflection. That is one of the reasons why smart people can get involved in very obviously unworkable relationships. Like addiction, that deep, Imago attachment is more powerful than logic, and in fact disables logic. So, any explanation or analysis or reflection on such a feeling is already many steps removed from the experience.

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