Alcohol Abuse Dependence

Alcohol Abuse Dependence

The most unworthy of these

The nurses were all talking about the two brothers. It’s was at the daily morning meeting, when the interdisciplinary team gathered to discuss the status of each patient in the hospital.

The nurses were exchanging notes on each patient and when the two brothers came up for review, the entire mood of the meeting changed.

I have found nurses to be professional and compassionate. Everything was always on a professional level with our group, but this day was different. The gloves were coming off and the two brothers were the cause of it all.

Let’s call them Bill and Bob. The nurses hated going into their rooms. Both were in at the same time, having been discovered by a social worker, who went to their house to check up on them, having not heard anything for a month.

The social worker said they were living in filth. Bill and Bob were literally so deeply involved with drugs that they did not take time to get up off the couch for bodily functions. The description of the house staggered my imagination.

After detox, the brothers were assigned rooms. They treated their stay at the hospital like incarceration. They were rude, vulgar and upon seeing them myself, I could understand the nursing staff’s disgust and irritation. There was nothing lovable about them.

They had sheer disdain for anybody else and the only thing that mattered to them was to get back to their house and continue using drugs. They had no use for me, of course, but it struck me that they needed to be loved and cared for, even if they want no part of it.

Alcohol Addiction did that to them.

I wondered what they were like before, or what happened to bring them to this state. The more vial and defiant they were, the more I was moved to compassion. What had caused them to be at this point in their drug addiction stories.

The two brothers were going to die if left to their own devices. You can argue against that I suppose, but there was no indication that they had any ability to stop using, or any desire to stop using. Living as they did, being in the condition they were in, it was only a matter of time.

Drug addiction is insidious. These brothers were not going to get better, because they had no capacity to connect all the dots.

Intervention, albeit forced, was the only thing that prevented death from having its say. They were 48 and 46 years old, but they looked 20 years older. It’s seems unlikely that either of their drug addiction stories were likely to end well.

From a Christian worldview, the story of these two brothers is heartbreaking because drug addiction has robbed them of their humanity. We see two nasty and disgusting men, but men who are dearly loved by God. For that fact alone, they are worthy. The lesson I learned was recovery from drug addiction is all about restoration of one’s humanity.

Click for more on Alcohol Abuse Dependence

A Story of Alcohol and Drug Addiction:

If you think you can understand.

Writing this now I’m 17 years old, I’ve been struggling with
drug addiction since I was 12. I got a MIC when I was 13 for drinking in
public, and since I couldn’t smoke weed I would take anything I could.
Mainly triple cs, and air duster was a big thing.

At the
beginning of my freshman year in high school I moved to Denver and I met
this guy who got me started on smoking meth. I started smoking every
day for about a month, I mean who doesn’t wanna get high for free? It
made me loose weight, I could actually get along with my parents, and I
could fly all night. Whenever I couldn’t get high I never freaked out,
my come downs just got worse and worse.

One night, I was smoking
with this dude and he starts to put some black stuff in the bubble and
for some reason I was so down, once couldn’t hurt anything right? That
was the first night I watched someone overdose. Everyone left him there
to die, even his mom. I just couldn’t understand how someone could leave
someone like that, without even calling an ambulance??

After that I promised myself I would continue to use as long as I never let myself become a shell of a human, a zombie.

I’ve
never had to spend my money on meth, I would find guys to smoke with me
and leave before they took what they wanted from me. Or I would go get
some stuff for my dad and just tell him I got ripped off.

Eventually
we moved to a different hotel and I started smoking heroin regularly
with them, meth was no longer a euphoric high for me but that tar had me
on a hook that I’ll never be able to forget or forgive.

I was
15 at the time riding the light rail home when some random guy asked me
if I wanted to go smoke, how could I resist that? I was so young and so
trusting in everyone that when we couldn’t find any foil I let him shoot
me up in a taco bell.

After that I used every day for about a
year, my dad didn’t want to believe or was really that ignorant. I knew
that if I learned how to give myself shots I would really have a problem
so I always had someone do it for me.

I was doing whatever I
could get my hands on, I’m not proud to admit it but I even gave someone
head for a ball of stuff and just enough tar to last me a few weeks.

I
started to get bad, it was obvious something was up but I would deny it
every time it got brought up. I had been up for 6 days and got arrested
at a McDonald’s for lying to the police about my name. I was so high I
couldn’t tell my head from my but and they knew the second they looked
at me. There was 5 cops there for me, and I was belligerent. I swore and
swore I wasn’t high, and they let me go without a ticket or anything.

I
took that as a sign that I needed to stop, I had never even thought
about quitting before but I was so sure I could do it without a sweat.
I’ve never been so wrong about anything in my life, it was the worst
thing I’ve ever gone through, I’ve never wanted to die so bad. If my dad
wasn’t there to take care of me, I probably would’ve died.

I
stayed clean for about a month before I started shooting up again, but I
was really careful to only do it once or twice a month for almost a
year. Then I wasn’t even doing meth, it was just tar. Then last July my
boyfriend at the time found out I was still using, and he would hit me
and hit me, so I stopped using all together.

Then at the
beginning of this year I started selling blow, and we were making so
much money we could afford to put half a zip up our noses everyday.
After a few weeks my nose got so bad my friend wouldn’t let me do it
anymore so I started smoking tar again, and that’s when it all starts
to hit the fan.

Reading some of the stories on here let me see situations much like my own from a different view, I’ve always been the addict.

People
go on and on about how it’s not a choice anymore, it’s a disease. There
is always a choice. You can choose to pull through the last little bit
of hell, or you can choose to rot in it forever. Some of you people who
are just trying to help need to pull your heads out of your but.

Making
more excuses for us isn’t going to make anything better, stop trying to
force help on people who don’t want it. Some people are addicted to
sleeping, or mudding or whatever you’re into; and that’s not a disease.

I mean I’m sure watching a loved one literally ruin their life
away to get high is probably worse than being the one who is ruining
their life, but that doesn’t mean people should justify it by saying
addiction is a disease.

How can you cure this “disease”? By
giving us way over priced drugs from our lovely government? Forget that.
The only way an addict is ever gonna get clean is if they want to, and
have the support to do so. I’m tired of making excuses for my addiction,
I’m tired of hearing other people’s excuses as well. There’s no excuse
for doing meth and heroin, nothing can justify that ever.

I
mean, I thought the first step in fixing a problem was to admit that you
have one? How can we do that if people are trying to ride it off as a
disease?

It hits a point where there’s no person left inside
anymore, just a fiend. They did that to themselves, that’s not a
disease. I personally believe that once you’re an addict you always will
be, regardless how long you’ve been clean. It’ll always be a huge part
of me, regardless of what I put myself through for it. I wouldn’t go
back and change the past because I’m still learning from it, one day I
know I’m gonna be really strong for it.

Every where around the
world there’s gonna be an opportunity to do some drugs and that’s what
scares me the most. You can’t be fully recovered until you can say no.
Lately I’ve been worried how long it’s gonna be before i can say no and
mean it. The only thing I want for my future is to not have to force
myself to say no, I want to want to say no.

Our Response:

It’s called a disease because it is attacking and changing your brain.

 

I can understand your frustration about the way people describe
addiction as a disease. It sounds like convenient excuse to allow people
to avoid accountability for their own choices.

But the problem with not understanding addiction as a disease is
that we don’t realize that when we’re addicted we’re being totally
controlled by the drug. As an addict, our brain’s change and because of
those changes we MUST use to feel “normal”. This is also why many people
view addiction as a fatal disease if left untreated.

From what you’ve said, it sounds like you want to get to a point
when you can say no to using because you WANT to say no. But the issue
you have is that your brain is being controlled by the drug and your
brain controls you.

Addiction recovery can be found as we work through our issues with
others and realize that a power bigger then ourselves is the only way
back to sobriety.

Choice or disease, you have the same problem regardless, how can you quit and get your life back?

I recommend you begin going to meetings with many other people
who’ve been where you’re at and see if people there can help you to
learn enough about yourself to learn how to end you addiction. The 12
steps were created for someone who is in the exact situation you’re in
and if you can begin to work the steps you will hopefully find the path
back that you’re looking for.