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.

I think the scariest addiction on this planet is to alcohol. Because alcohol is a very addictive drug, and it ruins families, it ruins relationships. And it is socially acceptable, and it is easy to find. Controlled substances, other drugs are more difficult to get, and it's a crime to... to buy them. But alcohol is everywhere. And if you are unfortunate enough to become addicted to it, it can be disastrous. And there is still a stigma attached to alcohol addiction, or addiction in general. It is perceived as... an addict is perceived as somebody of weak moral fiber

It was an addiction. A pointless, self-destructive addiction. But really, is there any other kind?

Once you've been overweight you never want to be overweight again, so you keep going, keep going, like for any addiction. Health can be an addiction, it doesn't have to be drugs or alcohol.

Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.

What is sex addiction? I asked a doctor and the guys goes, Sex addiction... People will end up doing something they don't want to do just for sex. Isn't that called a first date, man? If sex was the result of something I wanted to do, there'd be condoms all over my PlayStation.

Those who fervently love God are intoxicated by His warmth and live out their addiction like moths drawn to a flame.

The Gillard government must give up its addiction to wasteful spending borrowing and taxing.

Addiction has had such an impact on my life and the people I love, and there really is not a lot about it that is funny. So the last thing I wanted was to give the impression that it’s all fun and games, and isn’t it funny what she gets away with.

Addiction is a health issue, not a social issue, not a crime, not a legal issue.

For a while, I had this uncontrollable urge - this addiction to danger. Now I look back and I think, 'Gee, what an idiot. I was risking my life just for the sensation of it.'

I had to find meaning in it. So I go through this, I see all these homies die; I see all this terrible devastation, people sitting in prison. I've been saved from prison, from death, and from heroine addiction. What am I going to do with that?

It's almost an addiction that some people have to what I call the perfection that Hollywood presents of successful, beautiful, fun-loving people.

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.

I was happier when pursuing success than I was when savoring its fruits; the attraction, perhaps the addiction, was in the process, as much as in its end.

No behavior can be changed before it's acknowledged. And no addiction is beyond the reach of Love.

I've lost over 800 West Virginians the last year. Lost their lives to opiate and drug addiction. This is something that we've got to fight. We need to have treatment centers that take care of people. We need to start basically education from kindergarten all the way through adulthood. We need to get involved and stop this epidemic that's going on that's just ravaging.

Music is my personal addiction. So much of everything I've done has only been to open more doors for the music itself. It all gets back to the fact that I am, first of all, a songwriter and a singer.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Being forcefully rattled out of our consumer mentality - our addiction to comfort and convenience can create an opportunity for us [people] to reconnect with what we really value and with the qualities of life that really can sustain us - which include reconnecting with our roles as citizens, community members, and human beings.

Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.

Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.)

For me, I never knew what addiction was. I just knew my heroes, like [New York Dolls guitarist] Johnny Thunders, did heroin. I didn't have a father, it looked good to me. If I had read Johnny Thunders' book The Heroin Diaries, I don't think I would have done heroin.

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary.

The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.

We have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil... The best way to break this addiction is through technology.

If you try to shut down your angel guidance, that's the path to feeling unhappy and results in addiction.

Depression is about anger, it's about anxiety, it's about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths they have so painstakingly created for themselves. It is a plague - especially if you add in its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behavior of one kind or another. They're all the same things: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness, or chaos.

Music is a spiritual expression of what's in your heart. Music as a way of getting rich is a pretty new thing, and I often wonder if the mega-bucks glitzy atmosphere is making the quality of music suffer. You have to work really hard to get around that and remember why you're in it in the first place: because you have to be. It's like an addiction. You can't go a day without picking up your guitar. To me, the only commercial goals that are really valid are, 'Boy, I wish I didn't have to go to work. I wish I could do this all the time.'

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.

For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction... A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three - the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn't get you, the others are waiting in the wings.

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.

What I've learned to do is arrest my addiction - arrest it myself, so I don't get arrested.

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

I got addicted to the addiction book. I actually started developing all the addictions of the people in the book that I was writing about, without realizing it.

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.

Addiction is a symptom of not growing up.

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

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.

Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.

Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction.

Not why the addiction, but why the pain.

I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now. I don't want to be an enabler, sir. I'd rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.

While gambling addiction can be a social justice reason for some to ban gambling, the economic evidence suggests that the social and economic costs of gambling are $3 to the taxpayers for every $1 in benefits

People do not realize this, but my drug addiction was actually a short span of time. It was only for two years.

I think it’s the misperception of addiction and living life on the edge, as if it’s cool.