Addiction - I don't really know about drugs...

[blizz]

I hope that this post does not hit people the wrong way....but For the people that have friends that are addicted to hard drugs I want to ask....what is it that keeps them using? Are they hopeless to being clean? Is the addiction too hard to beat? Again I am not trying to make anyone feel bad...but for someone that has never done any sort of drug before it is hard to wrap your head around.

blizz added 18 Minutes and 5 Seconds later...

I don't know how to delete this post but after looking around I see there are discussion about this....I will read those...Sorry

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Welcome to Drugs-Forum, well done to look around as there is plenty of experiences to learn from

[Space Numpty]

Its called addiction love.

Imagine experiencing the most amazing thing you can imagine. If you have any emotional issues or dark feelings/thoughts imagine them all begin washed away.Then imagine trying to walk away from it.

By the time realisation hits, the body or the mind or both, depending on the substance, is deeply reliant.

Then imagine experiencing the most horrific thing you can. Then imagine trying to embrace it, when you know that (the) substance will take it all away.

This is the nature of addiction.

[Solinari]

Well, everyone has their vices be it sex, bungee jumping, skydiving, motor sports or gambling.

The problems start when their activity of choice starts to take over their life. If you took an honest look at yourself i think you would find you are addicted to something, the difference is that it's probably not doing you or anyone else any harm.

Some people like to take drugs. So called "hard drugs" do not necessarily lead to addiction. If someone becomes an addict then it usually doesn't matter what they become addicted to, that is to say if they never found heroin they would probably be addicted to alcohol (which would almost certainly be class A and illegal if it had been discovered today and not millennia ago), or if they never found alcohol they may be addicted to cocaine. The problem is usually systemic, they usually have issues before they become addicted and then when they find something that helps, maybe to dull the pain or forget about their worries then they could well be heading towards addiction.

This is just my opinion. I do not believe that addiction is inevitable when using drugs such as heroin, i believe there is usually other factors at play when someone becomes a heroin addict at least for my fiend and most other fiends he knows, there were "issues" before addiction took hold. I also believe that social stigma has a lot to do with heroin addiction as well as the intrinsic legal and criminal ramifications.

Then again, some people just do it for the sake of it, to get fucked up but they are quite often on self destruct mode, for whatever reason. Who knows, if we did know then we wouldn't have a problem.

Just to put things in perspective, alcohol and tobacco are responsible for more deaths than ALL other drugs combined including prescription drugs. Also drugs such as heroin and cocaine were legal almost as long as they have been illegal, at least i think that's true anyway, not far off at least.

[DrunkenProphet]

Originally Posted by blizz

I hope that this post does not hit people the wrong way....but For the people that have friends that are addicted to hard drugs I want to ask....what is it that keeps them using? Are they hopeless to being clean? Is the addiction too hard to beat? Again I am not trying to make anyone feel bad...but for someone that has never done any sort of drug before it is hard to wrap your head around.

blizz added 18 Minutes and 5 Seconds later...

I don't know how to delete this post but after looking around I see there are discussion about this....I will read those...Sorry

I can only answer this question from my own experience.

It would have never ever occured to me to try heroin. It was by chance that someone offered it to me and I was curious and didn't say "no". It was better than anything else that I had experienced in my whole life. From then on I just did it whenever I could. Needless to say I ended up getting hooked. For me the answer is that I am using because nothing else compares to that feeling. At some point you get to a stage where it's not even that good anymore, nothing like the amazing feeling you had at the beginning. But when you try to quit you feel very low and all you can think of is getting more drugs to make that low feeling go away. You just want it. Everything else ceases to matter. And then you wake up one day and you're physically SICK and you just need it... It's very hard to understand, just imagine you have the worst flu ever and a stomach bug on top and you know that ten pounds worth of brown powder will make it all go away and wipe out all your worries and make you feel amazing. It's just the nature of addiction and very hard to break through. You mentally crave the drug more then anything else AND you feel sick. The worse you feel the more you want it and the less you care about anything else that goes on around you.

For me, I was only able to deal with ANYTHING in my life (e.g. problems I only had because of my drug use in the first place, simple ordinary tasks like household) if I had taken some drugs. It was priority to get those and THEN I would deal anything else.

I don't think it can rationally understood by anyone who hasn't been in the situtation. I know I didn't understand people like that about 5 years ago. And now I'm like them.

[baba_yaga]

It's kind of a cheesy line from a cheesy film, and more than that it doesn't even apply that well to my own drug use most of the time (I really do just enjoy it too damn much), but there is this guy in a film called Cecil B Demented and some chick is asking him why he does drugs and he goes "Before I was on drugs I had all these problems, but now I only have one: drugs" and it kind of makes me laugh because there is a kind of truth to that. When you actually get kind of hooked on drugs then all the other problems are just subsets of the whole drug thing, theres really only one thing you need to focus on or worry about, theres something kind of soothing in that, it's almost like having a purpose except that it is an existentially kind of empty purpose.