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50 Best Drug Addiction Quotes and Sayings of All Time

August 06, 2020 Addiction

Drug addiction recovery is a challenging experience. Fortunately, a tremendous amount of resources is available to help you along the way . Some of these can inspire, and others, well let’s just say they let you look at your situation with humor. 

In this post, we’ll list 50 of our favorite drug addiction quotes and sayings of all time. Reading addiction recovery quotes from formerly addicted individuals can give you solace and inspiration for your recovery journey. Use this list to gain motivation to keep going along your recovery journey and stay drug-free.   

1) “The priority of any addict is to anaesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”

– Russell Brand on drug abuse  

2) “This stuff, this Mexican sludge, just grabbed you by the f–king heartstrings and tore me apart,” he told Rolling Stone. “All those years of snorting coke, and then I accidentally get involved in heroin after smoking crack for the first time. It finally tied my shoelaces together.”

– Robert Downey Jr. on facing the point when he faced the need for drug addiction recovery  

3) “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a hundred times.”

– Mark Twain with a hard truth on addiction recovery.  

4) “Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it’s a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it’s a trap.”

– Tess Callahan with one of our favorite drug addiction recovery quotes.  

5) “You just have to take it one day at a time. Some days are easier than others and some days you forget about drinking and using, but for me, I work on my physical health, which is important, but my mental health as well.”

– Demi Lovato on mental illness

6) “One of the hardest things was learning that I was worth recovery.”

– Another diamond from Demi speaking truth about addiction recovery  

7) “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”

– Mahatma Gandhi with philosophical insights for recovery quotes.  

8) “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche with a good philosophy to guide one’s drug addiction recovery.

9) “Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.”

– Carl Bard with another favorite from our drug addiction recovery quotes.  

10) “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

– Helen Keller, a true model for overcoming strife.  

11) “I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.”

– Samuel L. Jackson’s inspiring words to live by when struggling through addiction recovery.  

12) “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.”

– Benjamin Alire Sáenz on the possibilities of drug addiction recovery.  

13) “Fall seven times, stand up eight.”

– Japanese proverb  

14) “The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one’s desire for escape and abstinence from one’s addiction.”

– Debra L. Kaplan on the balancing act of addiction recovery.  

15) “What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.”

– Alice Miller on the true meaning of drug addiction recovery.  

16) “Nobody stays recovered unless the life they have created is more rewarding and satisfying than the one they left behind.”

– Anne Fletcher on what addicted individuals need to achieve true sobriety.

17) “You can come out of the furnace of trouble two ways: if you let it consume you, you come out a cinder; but there is a kind of metal which refuses to be consumed, and comes out a star.”

– Jean Church on how treatment options can help you shine. 

18) “You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.”

– Anne Lamott  

19) “Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you–it’s the cage you live in.”

– Johann Hari  

20) “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

– Henry Ford  

21) “Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem.”

– Kurt Cobain on the futility of substance abuse.

22) “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

– Vince Lombardi on making drug addiction recovery a new habit.  

23) “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

– Chinese Proverb  

24) “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

– Nelson Mandela  

25) “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

26) “the only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson with insights that people in addiction recovery can use to transcend their current plight.  

27) “If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.”

– Zen Proverb  

28) “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”

– Zig Ziglar proving that drug addiction recovery can be ongoing but worthwhile.  

29) “At first, addiction is maintained by pleasure, but the intensity of the pleasure gradually diminishes and the addiction is then maintained by the avoidance of pain.”

– Frank Tallis  

30) “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

– Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald  

31) “We don’t choose to be addicted; what we choose to do is deny our pain.”

– Unknown with real insights for the person in drug addiction recovery.  

32) “Remember just because you hit bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.”

– Robert Downey  

33) “It was the hardest boyfriend I ever had to break up with.”

– Fergie on struggling with drug addiction recovery.  

34) “Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles, and you have to change it.”

— James Lee Curtis on addiction recovery.  

35) “Recovery is not for people who need it. It’s for people who want it.”

– Unknown on who will find the greatest success in a drug addiction recovery program.  

36) “Recovery is a process. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes everything you’ve got.”

– Unknown  

37) “Be stronger than your strongest excuse.”

38) “it’s a beautiful day to be sober.”.

– Unknown on the best time to pursue drug addiction recovery.  

39) “If you chased your recovery like you chased your high, you would never relapse again.”

– Unknown with words of encouragement for those in drug addiction recovery.  

40) “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”

– C.S. Lewis  

41) “It is often in the darkest skies that we see the brightest stars.”

– Richard Evans  

42) “No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible.”

– George Chakiris with an important message for anyone in drug addiction recovery treatment.  

43) “The best way out is always through.”

– Robert Frost  

44) “One step at a time. One day at a time. One hour at a time.”

45) “there’s not a drug on earth that can make life meaningful.”.

– Unknown source on the real reason to fight for drug addiction recovery.  

46) “Never underestimate a recovering addict. We fight for our lives every day in ways most people will never understand.”

47) “be stronger than your strongest excuse.”.

– Unknown on facing the hard truths of drug addiction recovery.  

48) “Recovery is about progression, not perfection.”

49) “i am not defined by my relapses, but in my decision to remain in recovery despite them.”.

– Unknown person speaking truth about addiction recovery.

50) “I understood myself only after I destroyed myself. And only in the process of fixing myself, did I know who I really was.”

– Unknown 

Conclusion  

No matter what stage you are at with your drug addiction recovery , there is always hope. Hopefully, one or more of these quotes has inspired you to maintain your dedication to sobriety. 

Click here to contact an addiction expert that can help.  

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201 Inspiring Drug Addiction Quotes & Recovery Messages of All Time

Discover inspiring recovery and drug addiction quotes. motivational recovery and drug addiction quotes can save someone from the temptation to relapse. get inspired to get your life back today. continue to read more drug addiction quotes..

By We Level Up FL Treatment Center | Editor  Yamilla Francese  | Clinically Reviewed By  Lauren Barry, LMFT, MCAP, QS, Director of Quality Assurance  |  Editorial Policy  |  Research Policy  | Last Updated: December 29, 2022

Powerful Inspirational Drug Addiction Quotes

Motivational recovery quotes and drug addiction quotes can save someone from the temptation of going down the road to relapse. Recovery quotes reinforce and inspire people to stay on their journey to better their lives and families by maintaining sobriety. Many drug addiction quotes can encourage you to believe in yourself and the power you hold to improve your life.

Drug addiction recovery is a challenging experience. Fortunately, many resources are available to help you along the way. Some of these can inspire, and others, well, let’s say they let you look at your situation with humor. Hopefully, a quote about addiction recovery can help you maintain your commitment to your sobriety.  This post consists of more than 200 quotes about drug addiction, from quotes about loving someone with an addiction to funny quotes about addiction, Bible quotes about addiction, and many more.

Top 5 Inspirational Recovery Quotes

Reading drug addiction recovery quotes from formerly addicted individuals can give you solace and inspiration for your recovery journey. Use this list of recovery quotes by famous and influential leaders about recovery. Get motivated to continue your recovery journey to stay drug-free.  

1. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. “I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” – Charlotte Brontë

3. “Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.” – Mahatma Gandhi

4. Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt

5. “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” – Muhammad Ali

Addictive Quotes On Drugs

Here are a few popular quotes on drugs addiction to level up with today:

• “The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.” – Dale Carnegie
• “The first step in crafting the life you want is to get rid of everything you don’t.” – Joshua Becker
• “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” – Mark Twain
• “The road to recovery is not easy, but it is worth it.” – Unknown
• “Addiction is not a choice, it’s a disease.” – Unknown
• “The greatest step towards a life of recovery is the next one.” – Unknown
• “Recovery is possible for everyone, no matter how far gone you think you are.” – Unknown
• “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

Recovery Quotation on Drugs Abuse

An emotional quotation on drugs can offer reflection and self-discovery. Quotes about drug abuse can prompt individuals to reflect on their own experiences and beliefs about addiction. They can help individuals gain a deeper understanding of their own thoughts and feelings, and can facilitate self-discovery and personal growth.

We hope these addictive quotes on sobriety recovery are helpful. Remember that recovery from drug addiction is possible and there is help available. If you or someone you know is struggling with drug addiction, it’s important to seek professional help and support.

Inspirational Recovery Quotes 

Quotations About Drugs Addiction

Quotations about drugs abuse can serve a variety of purposes and have several potential benefits. Quotes about drug abuse can provide inspiration and motivation for those who are struggling with addiction or are in recovery. They can help remind individuals that recovery is possible and that they are not alone in their struggles.

Quotes about drugs addiction can be used to educate and raise awareness about the dangers and consequences of drug abuse. They can help shed light on the negative impact that drug abuse can have on individuals, families, and communities.

Quotes about drugs and alcohol abuse can provide encouragement and support to those who are struggling with addiction or are in recovery. They can help individuals feel seen and understood, and can offer hope and reassurance that there is a way out of addiction.

Hopeful quotes about drugs abuse can offer comfort and healing to those who have been affected by addiction in their own lives or in the lives of loved ones. They can help individuals find solace in the words of others who have gone through similar experiences.

Overcoming the disease of addiction and related mental health disorders is not an easy accomplishment. Each day can be a battle versus internal unrest and external stresses, wielding adverse effects on your psyche. Sometimes powerful recovery quotes can help boost one’s will to overcome obstacles, no matter how significant.

• Get Motivated With Quotes About Addiction & Sobriety

Sometimes, the right words in famous drug addiction inspirational quotes can supply us with the inspiration and strength we desperately need. Inspiration and strength are two of the most vital ingredients for anyone considering sobriety.

As humans, when things get tough, we tend to fall back into our old (unhealthy) patterns. We desperately need support and encouragement to overcome an addiction, which takes a lot of hard work and personal dedication. When we read powerful and inspiring quotes about drug addiction recovery, they make sense to us. The words resonate with us internally and have a positive impact; they give us the push we need to become our best selves.

If you’re sick and tired of contemplating sobriety, look at the quotes about overcoming addiction below. They might inspire you to take the first step toward the rest of your life.

Recovery Inspiration Quotes 1-5

• “It won’t be like this forever.”

Addiction makes a person feel hopeless and trapped. It controls us and makes us forget who we used to be. However, recovery is a step toward gaining control of your life again. You no longer have to be a slave to the disease. With sobriety, it is possible to regain that sense of freedom you felt you lost so long ago. Use inspirational recovery quotes to lift your spirit whenever you need to.

• No matter what the situation is, remind yourself, “’ I have a choice.’”

What is sobriety? Sobriety is a choice. Ultimately, it’s up to us – and us alone – to come out of denial and make the first step toward recovery. Likewise, we can determine the outcome when faced with an unexpected setback or a strong urge to use. Effective treatment can help us identify and overcome our triggers and allow us to make our own decisions about how to respond.

• “You are stronger than you think.”

A lot of us think there’s no way we’ll ever be able to give up drugs or alcohol, but we underestimate the strength within ourselves. Sure, the easier route may be to give up and return to our old ways, but we can beat this disease once and for all. We must commit to ourselves and have focus, determination, and hard work.

• “When everything seems like an uphill struggle, just think of the view from the top.”

Nobody ever said getting clean was easy, and it takes discipline to maintain it long-term. While the uphill climb may seem impossible initially, the result is one of the most rewarding accomplishments you’ll ever experience. The reward is regaining your life and reaching your true potential, making the hard work at the beginning worth it.

Drug Addiction Quotes Video

• “You’re worth it.”

Many of us suffer from low self-esteem, which, in turn, perpetuates the cycle of addiction. However, struggling with an addiction doesn’t mean we’re incapable, weak, or unworthy. It also certainly doesn’t mean we can’t change our lives and move past the disease holding us back. We are all worthy of being happy and living our lives to the fullest. Embrace your worth as a human being, and never settle for anything less than the healthy, happy, and sober life you deserve.

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Use this list of quotes for drug addiction about beating substance abuse to motivate you to continue your recovery and stay drug-free.   

Inspirational Recovery Quotes / Drug Addiction Quotes 6-20

• “I’ve wanted to feel pleasure to the point of insanity. They call it getting high because it’s wanting to know that higher level, that godlike level. You want to touch the heavens, you want to feel glory and euphoria, but the trick is it takes work.” – Anthony Kiedis
• “Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.” – Gary Oldman
• “It’s been a learning process. I’m growing. I couldn’t believe anybody could be naturally happy without being on something. So I would say to anybody, ‘it does get better.’” – Eminem
• “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent Van Gogh
• “I have no pleasure in the stimulants I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in pursuing pleasure that I have periled life, reputation, and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
• “And that’s what it’s like for me in recovery at times. Afraid to take on responsibility, new sponsees or something, or allowing myself to stand up and shine… I’ve got new tools, I’ve got new hope, new love, a new respect for myself.” – James Hetfield
• ‘I’ve been sober for 18 years now. It wasn’t like you flick a switch and you’re sober. It takes a while. You have to learn how to do everything all over again. There is life after addiction, and it’s really good. If I had known, I’d have stopped earlier.’ – Joe Walsh
• “I went to hell and back, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Then I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in, happy about life and comfortable in my skin.” – Drew Barrymore
• “A lot of people think that addiction is a choice. A lot of people think it’s a matter of will. That has not been my experience. I don’t find it to have anything to do with strength.” –Matthew Perry
• “I think that power is the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you’ve done.” – Robert Downey Jr.
• “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling
• “Not feeling is no replacement for reality. Your problems today are still your problems tomorrow.” – Larry Michael Dredla
• “What is an addiction? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” – Alice Miller
• “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be afraid you will make one continually.” – Elbert Hubbard
• “Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.” – Charlotte Whitton

Popular quotes on drug addiction rekindle the stimulation to remain drug and alcohol-free and also boost people’s morale to live life constructively without dependence on alcohol or addictive drugs. Apply the above drug addiction quotes and elevate the fruition of your rehabilitation and recovery process.

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Effective Recovery Inspiration Quotes About Addiction

Powerful drug addiction quotes about relapsing can save someone from the temptation of going down the relapse road. Addiction recovery sayings along with recovery inspirational quotes can help reinforce your focus on traveling down a healing pathway. They ignite a desire to be better and promote the will to stay strong. Reading and digesting inspirational addiction recovery quotes increases your chances of staying on track. Their short but compelling message is why they are passed on for generations. We hope you love our top selection of inspirational recovery quotes and share them with others, such as these “drug addict parents quotes.”

Recovery Inspirational Quotes / Drug Addiction Quotes 21-40

• “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
• “I’m not telling you it is going to be easy; I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.” – Art Williams
• “Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles, and you have to change. ” – Jamie Lee Curtis
• “Recovery is about progression, not perfection.” – Unknown
• “Recovery didn’t open the gates of heaven and let me in. Recovery opened the gates of hell and let me out!” – Anonymous
• “Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn’t end there.” – Bucky Sinister
• “I think that power is the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you’ve done.” – Robert Downey, Jr.
• “Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” – Carl Bard
• “If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” – Zen proverb
• “Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.” – Brittany Burgunder
• “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.” – Benjamin Alire Sáenz
• “Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt
• “I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” – Charlotte Brontë
• “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” – Muhammad Ali
• “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.” – Mahatma Gandhi
• “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” – Joseph Campbell
• “The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand as what direction you are moving.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
• “If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.” – Michael Jordan

Loving an addict is one of the most challenging things that can happen to most people. Whether in a romantic relationship with an addict, your child, your parent, or someone you’re close to, it’s tough to continue loving someone with signs of drug addiction or alcoholism. 

Below is a collection of “drug addicted parents quotes” about alcohol abuse and substance abuse that may be relevant for people who have been in love or are in a relationship with someone with addiction issues. Whether your choice is to hold on, to let go, or to detach with love… you might find the perfect quote about loving an addict here that could speak to your heart.

Inspirational Recovery Quotes / Drug Addiction Quotes 41-53

• “Ask anyone who has been in a love relationship for a while: nothing is perfect.” – Tracy McMillan
• “Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” – Hermann Hesse
• “A real relationship is like a river; the deeper it gets, the less noise it makes.” – Tony Gaskins
• “You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships daily. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.” – Epicurus
• “Difficult relationships come into our lives for a reason. No one would choose them, certainly. But if we let them, they can teach us how to be flexible with others and more forgiving.” – Joan Bauer
• “Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So, you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them, they somehow fly past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” – Stephen King
• “We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.” – Ellen Goodman
• “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals.” – Nicholas Sparks
• ” There are times when two people need to step apart from one another, but there is no rule that says they have to turn and fire. ” – Robert Brault
• ” At the end of the day, you can either focus on what’s tearing you apart or what’s keeping you together. ” – Anonymous
• ” I can’t promise that in our relationship you won’t face any problems, but I surely can promise that you won’t face them alone! ” – Rose Hathway
• ” When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free. ” – Catherine Ponder
• ” Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t. ” – Steve Maraboli

If you are experiencing addiction relapse, read these inspirational relapse quotes for drug addicts to get you back on track with your addiction recovery. These drug addiction quotes can be applicable whether you’re looking for quotes about meth addiction or quotes about alcohol addiction, or other struggles you are suffering from. Use these relapse quotes to get motivated to abstain from using again.

Inspirational Quotes for Recovery / Drug Addiction Quotes 54-59

• “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.” – Zig Ziglar
• “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Collier
• “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life; it comes to us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives, and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” – John Wayne
• “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” – Japanese proverb
• “Either you run the day, or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn

Positive Quotes for Recovery Addicts / Optimistic Drug Addiction Quotes 60-68

• “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth
• “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein
• “When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love …”  ―Marcus Aurelius
• “Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell.” – Carrie Fisher
• “It is 10 years since I used drugs or alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships, and, generally, a bright outlook… The price of this is constant vigilance because the disease of addiction is not rational.” – Russell Brand
• “Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest.” – Robert Downey Jr.
• “I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake, and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.” – Samuel L. Jackson
• “Once I was clear-headed and hadn’t been clear-headed in so long, I was like, I can never go back. And I’m still thankful.” – Travis Barker
• “I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: ‘Wait a minute – if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?’ And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk.” ― Craig Ferguson

Famous Quote About Addiction Recovery

Breaking free from alcohol and drug abuse is not an attempt at achieving the impossible. It is the direct opposite. Millions of people have successfully reclaimed their lives after a long downward spiral on the destructive path of substance abuse. Below are inspirational drug addiction quotes for recovery.

Quotes For Recovery Addicts / Drug Addiction Quotes 69-78

• “I realized I only had two choices: I was either going to die, or I was going to live, and which one did I want to do? And then I said, ‘I’ll get help,’ or, ‘I need help. I’ll get help.’ And my life turned around. Ridiculous for a human being to take 16 years to say, ‘I need help.’” – Sir Elton John
• “My recovery from drug addiction is the single greatest accomplishment of my life… but it takes work — hard, painful work — but the help is there, in every town and career, drug/drink freed members of society, from every single walk and talk of life to help and guide.” – Jamie Lee Curtis
• ‘‘If it weren’t for that rehab center, I probably wouldn’t have been here. In terms of recovery, it has been very important for me to be a part of a recovery community and to be around my people because they understand me actively. They get it.” – Macklemore
• “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much can you love?! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!” – Anne Frank
• “What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” – Hecato
• ‘Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower.’ – Shigenori Kameoka
• “What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• “All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for. “– Jon Kabat-Zinn
• People spend a lifetime searching for happiness, looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, and even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.” – Ramona L. Anderson

People struggling with substance abuse confront difficult days of utter despair lacking the desire to get better. Uplifting drug addiction quotes can help sway someone from making the wrong choice.

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Funny Alcohol Quotes

Wishing for recovery isn’t enough. No matter how good your intentions are, they amount to nothing if you fail to take the necessary steps to make them happen. Take the first step by accepting help from an alcoholism treatment program.

Discover top funny alcohol quotes to famous drug addiction quotes below. While alcohol quotes can provide a greater breather, using positive quotes about drinking alcohol can serve to dissuade us from drinking.

Inspirational Speedy Recovery Quotes 79-91

• “Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.” — Seneca
• “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.” — G.K. Chesterton
• “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” — Winston Churchill
• “Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.” — John Green, Paper Towns
• “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• “I like liquor — its tastes and effects — and that is just the reason why I’ll never drink it.” – Stonewall Jackson
• “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” — Oscar Wilde, on absinthe
• “Always do sober what you said you’d do when you were drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!” — Ernest Hemingway
• “Money, like vodka, can play queer tricks with a man.” — Anton Chekhov
• “As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them.” — Robin Williams, Weapons of Self-Destruction
• “She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?” — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
• “It is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool — it drives the man to dancing… it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.” — Homer, The Odyssey
• “From the fool and the drunkard you may learn the truth.” — Modern Greek proverb

Many funny alcohol quotes about drinking are thoughtful and meaningful. Use them to get to a better place. These drink alcohol quotes are meant for the reader to think twice before drinking. We hope you come back often to get motivated with our positive alcoholism quotes for recovery.

Meaningful Drug Addiction Quote

Quotes about addiction help shine a light on hope and success in sobriety. Here’s to your success and health.

You must forgive yourself and leave the guilt and shame behind you. Don’t carry your past mistakes as a burden on your shoulders. Make the necessary amends and push forward. You might find a quote about addiction recovery here that may resonate with your feelings.

Inspiring Quotes About Recovery 92-101

• “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
• “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wild
• “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
• “Amid winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.” – Albert Camus
• “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” – Helen Keller
• “We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely … change is due to wanting power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.” – George Sheehan
• “Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.” – Bernard Williams
• “You can come out of the furnace of trouble two ways: if you let it consume you, you come out a cinder; but there is a kind of metal which refuses to be consumed, and comes out a star.”– Jean Church
• “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear.” – Rosa Parks
• “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”– C.S. Lewis

Inspirational Quotes For Addicts In Recovery

Even at your lowest point of discouragement, you can still find the strength to overcome substance abuse as long as you take actionable steps to achieve this goal. Use the below drug addiction quotes to stay on course to sobriety.

Inspirational Quotes About Recovery 102-108

• “Sometimes, we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don’t ever want to be again.”– Shane Niemeyer
• ‘When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways: by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits or using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.’ – Dalai Lama
• ‘Cause sometimes you just feel tired. Feel weak, and you want to give up when you feel weak. But you gotta search within yourself. You have gotta find that inner strength. And just pull it out of you, and get that motivation not to give up, and not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face.’ – Eminem
• Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.’ – Marie Curie
• ‘Life has many ways of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once.’ – Paulo Coelho
• “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” – Dr. Seuss
• “Nothing is impossible; the word itself says, ‘I’m possible!’” – Audrey Hepburn

Inspiring Quotes About Addiction Recovery 109-113

• “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
• “As one goes through life, one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.” – Katharine Hepburn
• “Amazing how we can light tomorrow with today.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
• “Keep steadily before you the fact that all true success depends at last upon yourself.” – Theodore T. Hunger

Drug addiction quotes can provide essential peace and reflection. Use quotes about addiction recovery to reflect on your personal sobriety success.

Drug addiction quote for support

No matter who it is, hopefully, the drug addiction quotes above and the below quotes for families of addicts can help you start or continue the recovery process.

Inspirational Addiction Recovery Quotes 114-118

• “She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.” – Ellen Burstyn, American actress
• “Addiction, at its worst, is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. You’re like a hostage who has developed an irrational affection for your captor. They can abuse you, torture you, even threaten to kill you, and you’ll remain inexplicably and disturbingly loyal.”  – Ann Clendening
• “Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends of being the biggest step of your life. Tiptoe if you must, but take the step.” – Naeem Callaway
• “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Coller

The above drug addiction quotes and the family present a realistic yet optimistic vision of the struggles a family encounters because of a loved one’s substance use disorder. While the difficulties are indisputable, powerful drug addiction quotes for families can be uplifting and supportive.

All drugs, including alcohol and pharmaceutical medications, can cause an overdose.  An overdose happens when a person has more of a drug or a combination of drugs than their body can manage. Many people think illegal drugs, like heroin, are the leading cause of overdose, but rates of pharmaceutical drug overdose are higher. Doing something early can save a life. We hope you enjoy these wise overdose quotes. Be sure to get the help and support you need and use helpful overdose quotes to overcome obstacles to sobriety.

Inspiring Quotes About Addiction Recovery 119-122

• “Drugs are just for those who cannot accept or handle reality.”
• “Overdose awareness is important to save our today and our tomorrow.”
• “Life is what we can make of it…. Let us work hard to make it a better one with overdose awareness.”
• “If you want to be lost in something, be lost in something good.”

Read and share our inspirational drug addiction quotes to help you or a loved one stay on track.

Quotes about losing a loved one might be exactly what you need in your time of loss and suffering. Losing a loved one is never easy, but hopefully, these meaningful drug addiction quotes can help you.

Inspirational Quotes About Addiction / Inspirational Quotes About Mental Health Recovery 123-140

• “All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.” ― Michael McDowell
• “The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.” ― Rob Liano
• “We never truly get over a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it.”— Elizabeth Berrien
• “Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death.”—Anonymous
• “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love.”– Washington Irving
• “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.”– Dante
• “The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives.”– Norman Cousins
• “May you find the strength and resolve today, to allow a deeper sense of healing to begin.” – Eleesha
• “The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.”—Kristina McMorris
• “Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.” – Jackson Brown Jr.
• “The very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes. And let it go when we can.”— Grey’s Anatomy
• “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” – Isaac Asimov
• “Never take life for granted. Savor every sunrise, because no one is promised tomorrow…or even the rest of today.” ― Eleanor Brownn
• “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.”—James O’Barr
• “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.”- Anne Frank
• “When we lose someone we love we must learn not to live without them, but to live with the love they left behind.” – Anonymous
• “Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.” – Paulo Coelho
• “If I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes then share with me your smile.” – Santosh Kalwar

While drug addiction quotes about losing someone can feel a little soothing, it is important to realize your loved ones are always with you so long as they are remembered. We hope you will find our popular addiction quotes for loved ones’ spirituality uplifting.

Inspirational Drug Addiction Quote

Read our best addiction quotes.

Some substance abuse quotes talk about how meth changed their lives forever. Meth addiction gradually steals everything you care about without you noticing. Like a thief in the night, one day you wake up to find everything gone. Find out more about meth addiction treatment.

Inspirational Quotes About Addiction Recovery 141-145

• “Methamphetamine is a hideous drug. Meth makes a person paranoid, violent, and aggressive – making them a serious threat to society and law enforcement. And maybe, more importantly, meth users threaten their children and families.” – Dirk Kempthorne
• “A shot to kill the pain. A pill to drain the shame. A purge to end the gain. A cut to break the vein. A smoke to ease the craving. A drink to win the game. An addiction is an addiction because it all hurts the same.” – Unknown
• “People who have never had an addiction don’t understand how hard it can be.” – Payne Stewart
• “Addiction is a scary disease. Please, don’t be ashamed to ask for help. You can always fight it.” – Unknown
• “If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a “fix” of something, to its detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.” – Rob Stampfli

In reality, those who have suffered from heroin addiction understand that it’s an everyday struggle. Find out more about heroin addiction treatment. Unfortunately, these recent high-profile tragedies and heroin quotes prove that addiction is a lifelong battle. Drug addiction quotes can help cope with loss.

Quotes About Addiction Recovery Can Offer Words of Inspirational Healing 146-150

• “I’ve been clean for seven years but still think about using heroin everyday. Sometimes the thought is fleeting, but sometimes it scares me how long I think about using. Whenever it gets to be too much, I also think about the hopelessness of that time in my life. Recovery can be a struggle, but it’s a struggle that gives me my life today.” – Jim: Executive Marketing Professional
• “My identity shifted when I got into recovery. That’s who I am now, and it actually gives me greater pleasure to have that identity than to be a musician or anything else, because it keeps me in a manageable size.” – Eric Clapton
• “From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem like I had it all. It was actually a very lonely time for me because I was suffering from alcoholism…I’ve been the lead in movies, on television shows and nominated for Emmy. But the best thing I can say about me is that people who can’t stop drinking come up to me and say, ‘Can you help me?’ And I can say, ‘Yes.’” – Matthew Perry
• “I’ve been in recovery for 23 years and relapsed seven times. But, the support I get in the recovery community has helped me every time I start drinking again. No judgment, just help and support. Without my recovery program, I know I would have drank myself into an early grave every time. Recovery isn’t always easy, but it certainly beats the alternative.” – Bill: Military Veteran
• “When I first started taking prescription pills, I didn’t think I had a problem. I had a good job and lots of friends. After a while though, I lost my job and slowly my friends. The thing is, I barely even noticed or cared. Finally, I got treatment after horrible withdrawals. Now that I am in recovery, I understand how blinding my addiction was.” – Nicole: Registered Nurse

Even the rich and famous have been affected by the addiction epidemic growing across America. Powerful real-life drug addiction quotes by celebrities just go to show how the above quotes about addiction recovery can come from all walks of life including those that have “everything”.

Sometimes when things are hard, a few words in consequential drug addiction quotes can help you and your loved one get through a difficult day. Whether or not the author knew these addict family quotes would be applied to addiction and love, their wise words carry insight for those struggling. If you or your significant other struggles with addiction, these love, and addiction quotes will help you better understand addiction, motivate change and inspire you to seek help.

Inspirational Quotes About Addiction Recovery 151-156

• “The worst part about anything that’s self-destructive is that it’s so intimate. You become so close with your addictions and illnesses that leaving them behind is like killing the part of yourself that taught you how to survive.” -Lacey L.
• “Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tip toe if you must, but take the step.” -Naeem Callaway
• “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain
• “Never underestimate a recovering addict. We fight for our lives every day in ways most people will never understand.” — Unknown
• “I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” – Charlotte Brontë
• “Sometimes you’ve just got to give yourself what you wish someone else would give you.” – Dr. Phil

2 Years Clean Quotes Drug Addiction Quotes

Two and likewise one year of sobriety quotes is inspirational sayings about addiction recovery. These serve to encourage you to stop and meditate for a while on your recovery journey with drug addiction quotes that we consider worthy of your attention. These drug addiction quotes can help renew your motivation to stay drug and alcohol-free and inspire you to live productively and actively. Use the below for both two year and one year of sobriety quotes anniversaries.

Positive Quotes About Addiction Recovery 157-162

• “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop” – Confucius
• “I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: ‘Wait a minute – if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?’ And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk.” ― Craig Ferguson
• “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” — Chinese Proverb
• “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails always to reach my destination.” – Jimmy Dean
• “I dwell in possibility.” – Emily Dickinson

Stopping to reflect on your progress by reading what others say about your achievements is a fantastic way to stay motivated and positive about your success.

Every bit of support is more than welcome when you are fighting an addiction. When the battle gets tough, reading or listening to inspirational individuals who successfully overcame their addiction with alcohol addiction quotes or quotes about addiction recovery can be pretty helpful.

Positive Quotes for Addicts in Recovery 163-167

• “Don’t let the past steal your present.” –Terri Guillemets
• “Addiction begins with the hope that something “out there” can instantly fill up the emptiness inside.” – Jean Kilbourne
• ‘Hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things, and good things never die.’ – Stephen King
• “The only journey is the one within.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
• “Every experience in your life is being orchestrated to teach you something you need to know to move forward.” – Brian Tracy

The road to recovery is an ongoing adventure that can sometimes seem scary, but you never have to go through it alone. Whether you’ve just decided to get clean or are years into your journey, the team at We Level Up is here to help you through every step. Here are a few “quotations about drugs.”

Drug Addiction Quotes 168-171

• “Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem.” – Kurt Cobain on the futility of substance abuse.
• “I understood myself only after I destroyed myself. And only in the process of fixing myself, did I know who I really was.” – Unknown
•  “We don’t choose to be addicted; what we choose to do is deny our pain.” – Unknown with real insights for the person in drug addiction recovery.
• “What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” – Alice Miller on the true meaning of drug addiction recovery.  

Addiction Quotes For Family 

Positive quotes about addiction and family account for how addiction is a family disease. Addiction can happen to anyone — even in communities filled with loving people. Unfortunately, when a drug addiction develops, family members and friends are also often directly impacted by the addiction. That’s why, in addition to taking steps to help get your loved one into a drug and alcohol rehab [1], it’s crucial for family members and friends to have a good understanding of addiction and how to continue to take care of their health as well.

Inspirational recovery quotes are meant to help you and your family renew your commitment to a drug- and alcohol-free lifestyle and inspire you to live your life to its fullest. So whether you’re hoping to inspire your journey to recovery or showing your support to a loved one, we hope the following quotes make you take to heart and celebrate. Please enjoy our top addiction quotes for loved ones.

Positive Drug Addiction Quotes For Family 172-178

• “Recovery is not a race. You don’t have to feel guilty if it takes you longer than you thought it would.“
• “There is no shame in beginning again, for you get a chance to build bigger and better than before. “
• “Addiction: the disease that makes you too selfish to see the havoc you created or care about the people whose lives you have shattered.“
• “When your heart is breaking for someone who is broken, but your words can’t reach them, ask the angels to go where you cannot. To whisper into their heart that their ears can’t hear: “We will not give up on you. Don’t give up on yourself.”

When reading positive drug addiction quotes, you can fill your mind with positive thoughts. Leading you to feel better while driving away depression triggers and related relapse inclinations. Share positive addiction quotes for loved ones to celebrate their recovery success.

Popular Drug Addiction Quote by Demi Lavato

• “You don’t get over an addiction by stopping using. You recover by creating a new life where it is easier to not use. If you don’t create a new life, then all the factors that brought you to your addiction will catch up with you again“
• “The worst part about anything self-destructive is that it’s so intimate. You become so close with your addictions and illnesses that leaving them behind is like killing the part of yourself that taught you how to survive.“
• “Recovery: It will be challenging. It will also be worth it. You will relapse, and that’s ok, as long as you keep fighting“

Family addition quotes shed light on the harm to the entire family from substance abuse. Healing is needed by both the addict and their entire family. Quotes for addicts’ family members are important because they should not be forgotten heroes supporting loved ones during their struggle to get better.

Do sobriety quotes or encouragement quotes for addiction recovery help keep you from relapsing? When staying sober daily, we experience our full range of emotions. When sober, people can live daily without their thoughts and behaviors being controlled by an addiction to a substance. They do not feel compelled to use it because they successfully live without it. We hope you find comfort and recovery from the drug addiction quotes listed in this post.

Inspirational Drug Addiction Quotes 179-186

• “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford
• “If things go wrong, don’t go with them.” – Roger Babson
• “Every noble work is at first impossible.” – Thomas Carlyle
• “Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.” – Aldous Huxley
• “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
• “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
• “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

Although your past behaviors shape who you are, it does not define who you will be. This is determined by your actions and behavior, not your past addiction. What you did in the past does not decide who you will be in the future. Please enjoy these popular uplifting drug addiction quotes.

Recovering Drug Addiction Quotes 187-191

• “There’s not a drug on Earth that can make life meaningful.” – Sarah Kane
• “That’s all drugs and alcohol do, they cut off your emotions in the end.” – Ringo Starr
• “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” – Mahatma Gandhi
• “Addiction begins with the hope that something ‘out there can instantly fill up the emptiness inside.” – Jean Kilbourne
• “Recovery is something that you have to work on every single day, and it’s something that it doesn’t get a day off.” — Demi Lovato

Best Narcotics Anonymous Quotes

Support groups for all types of addictions allow people to join with others with similar experiences, backgrounds, and struggles. Drug and alcohol substance use groups are helpful whether you are interested in a support group as the first step in your recovery from a drug or alcohol addiction or if you want to participate in a group to remain sober and help newer members. Below are some of the famous drug addiction quotes for addiction recovery at Narcotics Anonymous.

NA Drug Addiction Quotes 192-201

• “I am one drug away from never being clean again for the rest of my life.”
• “Every time I draw a clean breath, I’m like a fish out of water.”
• “Drugs gave me the illusion that I might be alive.”
• “An NA meeting is where losers get together to talk about their winnings”
• “If I could use socially I’d get high every night.”
• “Having resentment is like using poison and expecting someone else to die.”
• “The road to recovery is a simple journey for confused people with a complicated disease”
• “My recovery depends on who God is, not who I am.”
• “Every time I draw a clean breath, I’m like a fish out of water.” ― Narcotics Anonymous
• “My favorite six words in recovery are: trust God, clean house, and help others.” — Matthew Perry

We hope you enjoyed our top narcotic anonymous quotes for recovery.

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Top 5 Drug Addiction Quotes Connected Questions

What is drug addiction, in simple words.

Drug addiction, also called substance use disorder, is “ a disease that affects a person’s brain” and behavior and leads to an inability to control the use of a legal or illegal drug or medicine. Substances such as alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine also are considered drugs.

How will you say no to drugs?

Tell the person you don’t want to drink or use drugs in a firm voice. Say something like: – “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t use….” – “No, I’m really trying to stay clean.” – “No, I’m trying to cut back.” Give a reason why you don’t want to drink or use drugs.

How can we encourage people to avoid drugs?

Be a good role model and stay drug-free. Let them know that most young people do not use drugs. Help them understand the negative consequences of using drugs. Teach them ways to resist pressure to use drugs.

How can drugs affect your life?

Drug use can lead to severe changes in the brain that affect how a person thinks and acts. It can also cause other medical problems, even death. Some drugs can cause heart disease, cancer, lung problems, and mental health conditions, such as depression.

What is the main effect of a drug?

Each drug causes different physical reactions, depending on the type of drug. Some will make you feel more awake, alert, and energetic. Others will give you a calm, relaxed feeling. Some alter your perceptions and can cause hallucinations. These are just the initial main effects, but drug addiction is dangerous and can cause an overdose. Untreated drug addiction problems lead to broken families, losing jobs, and even death.

If you are thinking of seeking drug addiction treatment for yourself or a loved one, you are not alone. The number of people suffering from substance use disorders in the US is astounding. Here are some reports from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. [2]

59.3 Million

More than 59.3 million people 12 or older used illicit drugs in the past year, including 49.6 million who used marijuana. 

Source: SAMHSA

Two out of three drug overdose deaths in 2018 involved an opioid.

10.1 Million

In 2019, an estimated 10.1 million people aged 12 or older misused opioids in the past year. Specifically, 9.7 million people misused prescription pain relievers, and 745,000 people used heroin.

Drug Addiction Facts

Addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing disorder characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use despite adverse consequences. It is considered a brain disorder, because it involves functional changes to brain circuits involved in reward, stress, and self-control. Those changes may last a long time after a person has stopped taking drugs.

What is drug use?

Drug use, or misuse, includes:

• Anabolic steroids
• Methamphetamines
• Taking a medicine that was prescribed for someone else
• Taking a larger dose than you are supposed to
• Using the medicine in a different way than you are supposed to. For example, instead of swallowing your tablets, you might crush and then snort or inject them.
• Using the medicine for another purpose, such as getting high
• Misusing over-the-counter medicines, including using them for another purpose and using them in a different way than you are supposed to

Drug use is dangerous. It can harm your brain and body, sometimes permanently. It can hurt the people around you, including friends, families, kids, and unborn babies. Drug use can also lead to addiction.

What are the treatments for drug addiction?

Treatments for drug addiction include counseling, medicines, or both. Research shows that combining medicines with counseling gives most people the best chance of success.

The counseling may be individual, family, or group therapy. It can help you:

• Understand why you got addicted
• See how drugs changed your behavior
• Learn how to deal with your problems so you won’t go back to using drugs
• Learn to avoid places, people, and situations where you might be tempted to use drugs

Medicines can help with the symptoms of withdrawal. For addiction to certain drugs, some medicines can help you re-establish normal brain function and decrease your cravings.

It is a dual diagnosis if you have a mental disorder and addiction. It is crucial to treat both problems. This will increase your chance of success.

You may need hospital-based or residential treatment if you have a severe addiction. Residential treatment programs combine housing and treatment services.

Drug use and addiction are preventable. Prevention programs involving families, schools, communities, and the media may prevent or reduce drug use and addiction. These programs include education and outreach to help people understand the risks of drug use.

If you are addicted to drugs or alcohol, your first step in recovery should be a medical detox in a safe and medically supervised setting.  That is why We Level Up treatment center is here for you.  We Level Up detox center medically assists patients in clearing their systems of addictive substances.

We Level Up addiction treatment center’s thorough approach to rehabilitation supports several levels of care to ensure the best possible outcome for every patient who enters our doors.  From an intensive and more supportive atmosphere for those in the early days of recovery to a comfortable residential-style living dynamic upon completion of detox, We Level Up is here to help guide you down the safe, medication-assisted treatment and results-based path to sobriety.

We know that recovering from addiction can be challenging at We Level Up inpatient drug and alcohol rehab facility in Florida. However, these drug addiction quotes for recovering addicts may be able to help. Read them aloud or put them somewhere where you will see them frequently. These inspirational quotes can make a significant impact on your path to recovery. Find out more daily inspiration for alcoholics.

Several treatment options can effectively treat drug addiction. Encourage your friend or loved one to talk to their doctor or a treatment counselor about using alcohol treatment programs, substance abuse treatment, relapse prevention, or support groups as part of their recovery.

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[1] Treatment Approaches for Drug Addiction DrugFacts – National Institute on Drug Abuse with related drug addiction quotes plus sobriety quotes

[2] National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) – Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Topics Concerning Drug Addiction Quotes and Recovery with related sobriety quotes

[3] McKay JR. Impact of Continuing Care on Recovery From Substance Use Disorder. Alcohol Res. 2021 Jan 21;41(1):01. DOI: 10.35946/arcr.v41.1.01. PMID: 33500871; PMCID: PMC7813220. About Drug Addiction Quotes and Recovery with related sobriety quotes

[4] Fluyau D, Charlton TE. Drug Addiction. [Updated 2022 Aug 29]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549783/ Concerning Drug Addiction Quotes and Recovery plus sobriety quotes

[5] Justinova Z, Panlilio LV, Goldberg SR. Drug addiction. Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2009;1:309-46. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-88955-7_13. PMID: 21104390; PMCID: PMC3039293. With Drug Addiction Quotes and Recovery with related sobriety quotes

[6] Jahan AR, Burgess DM. Substance Use Disorder. [Updated 2022 May 5]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK570642/ with related drug addiction quotes plus sobriety quotes

[7] McLellan AT. Substance Misuse and Substance Use Disorders: Why do they Matter in Healthcare? Trans Am Clin Climatol Assoc. 2017;128:112-130. PMID: 28790493; PMCID: PMC5525418. With Drug Addiction Quotes and related sobriety quotes

[8] 101 Motivational Quotes for Recovering Addicts – and related drug addiction quotes plus sobriety quotes – WeLevelUp.com

[9] Co-Occurring Dual Diagnosis Treatment – with related drug addiction quotes plus sobriety quotes – We Level Up Florida

[10] 100 Sobriety Anniversary Quotes -drug addiction quotes plus sobriety quotes – WeLevelUp.com

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Quotes on drug addiction recovery, table of contents, drug addiction recovery: turning the page to a brighter future, why might you want to recover from drug addiction, navigating the roadblocks on your path to recovery, 50 quotes on drug addiction recovery, 50 unique quotes on drug addiction recovery, to conclude.

Hello there,

I’m Divya, your life coach, guiding you on your path to betterment. Often, we find ourselves locked in a cage of our own making, and for some, this cage is drug addiction .

It’s not your fault, the pull of these substances can be overwhelming. However, I’m here today to provide you with some light during this journey of recovery, as well as to remind you that no night is so dark that the dawn cannot break it.

Let’s imagine, you are a passionate and diligent individual, always on the move. You juggle multiple roles – professional, family person, friend, and so much more. However, somewhere along the line, drugs became a part of your life, a shadow that follows you wherever you go.

It started innocently, a coping mechanism for the stress of your demanding life, perhaps. Or maybe, it was a way to escape the harsh realities of life, even if just momentarily. But with time, these substances have begun to eat away at the very fabric of your life. Your work, relationships, and health are suffering. You realize that this isn’t the life you envisioned for yourself.

It’s okay, we all stumble. The key lies in getting up and dusting ourselves off. You want to get back into the driver’s seat of your life. You want to break free from the shackles of addiction and experience life in all its beauty again. You want to embark on the journey of drug addiction recovery , not just for others, but primarily for yourself.

It’s a brave decision, one that deserves all the support and encouragement it can get. It can be tough, yes, but every step you take toward recovery is a testament to your strength and resilience.

In the following paragraphs, you’ll find carefully curated quotes to inspire you, give you strength, and help you stay committed on your journey of drug addiction recovery. I hope they bring you comfort and guide you through your darkest hours toward a brighter, healthier future.

Remember, every journey begins with a single step. The path may be arduous, but the destination is well worth it. I am here for you, and I believe in you. Together, we can turn the page to a new chapter of wellness and self-love.

Stay strong, my friend. Your dawn is near.

Now, let’s talk about some of the common challenges you might face because you’re unsure about how to effectively recover from drug addiction . It’s important to know that you’re not alone, and these challenges are often stepping stones on your path to recovery.

• The Fear of Withdrawal : This can be a major roadblock. You’ve probably heard about or even experienced the physical discomfort associated with drug withdrawal. Remember, it’s temporary . It might be hard to believe in the throes of it, but withdrawal is a sign that your body is healing. It’s the first chapter of your recovery story, and it will pass .
• Relapse Triggers : Certain situations, people, or places may trigger a strong desire to use again. Recognize this for what it is – a test of your resilience. Find ways to avoid these triggers, and if that’s not possible, devise strategies to deal with them without resorting to drug use.
• A feeling of Isolation : The journey to recovery can sometimes feel lonely. You are not alone . Reach out to supportive friends, family, or join a recovery community. Remember, it’s okay to lean on others for strength when you need it.
• Coping with Emotions : Substance use might have been a way to numb painful emotions. As you recover, these feelings will resurface. Don’t run from them. Instead, seek professional help to learn healthier ways to cope.
• Rebuilding Self-Esteem : Long-term drug use can leave you feeling worthless or incapable. But remember, you are strong . You’re embarking on one of the most challenging journeys of your life. That takes incredible courage and resilience.
• Living a Sober Life : Some fear that life without drugs will be boring or unfulfilling. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Sober life is not just about giving up drugs, it’s about discovering a new way of living that’s fulfilling, enriching, and rewarding.

Remember, these challenges are not insurmountable. They’re just steps on your journey, and each one you overcome takes you closer to your goal – a healthy, fulfilling life free from the clutches of drug addiction. You have the strength to overcome and you are worthy of recovery . Always remember that.

Here are some inspirational quotes on drug addiction recovery by various well-known personalities:

• “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “We are all addicted to something that takes away the pain.” – Bell Hooks
• “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt
• “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.” – Benjamin Alire Sáenz
• “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
• “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” – C.S. Lewis
• “Addiction isn’t about substance – you aren’t addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.” – Susan Cheever
• “Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell.” – Carrie Fisher
• “Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles and you have to change it.” – Jamie Lee Curtis
• “Recovery is something that you have to work on every single day and it’s something that doesn’t get a day off.” – Demi Lovato
• “Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.” – Aldous Huxley
• “My recovery must come first so that everything I love in life doesn’t have to come last.” – Unknown
• “Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” – Carl Bard
• “I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake, and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.” – Samuel L. Jackson
• “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” – Mahatma Gandhi
• “When everything seems like an uphill struggle, just think of the view from the top.” – Unknown
• “Recovery is not for people who need it, it’s for people who want it.” – Unknown
• “I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” – Charlotte Bronte
• “Healing is an art. It takes time, it takes practice. It takes love.” – Maza Dohta
• “Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn’t end there.” – Bucky Sinister
• “I think that the power is the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you’ve done.” – Robert Downey Jr.
• “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” – John Green
• “In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.” – Deepak Chopra
• “Every noble work is at first impossible.” – Thomas Carlyle
• “Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.” – Steve Maraboli
• “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
• “Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.” – Gary Oldman
• “Recovery is all about using our power to change our beliefs that are based on faulty data.” – Kevin McCormack
• “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “I am not defined by my relapses, but in my decision to remain in recovery despite them.” – Unknown
• “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” – George Eliot
• “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” – Joseph Campbell
• “Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.” – Brittany Burgunder
• “Remember that just because you hit bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.” – Robert Downey Jr.
• “Recovery is not a race. You don’t have to feel guilty if it takes you longer than you thought it would.” – Unknown
• “Courage isn’t having the strength to go on – it is going on when you don’t have strength.” – Napoléon Bonaparte
• “Where there is life, there is hope.” – Stephen Hawking
• “I know you’re tired. I know you’re physically and emotionally drained, but you have to keep going.” – Unknown
• “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” – Nelson Mandela
• “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.” – Akshay Dubey
• “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “There’s not a drug on earth that can make life meaningful.” – Sarah Kane
• “Sometimes the people around you won’t understand your journey. They don’t need to, it’s not for them.” – Joubert Botha
• “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
• “Sometimes you’ve got to go through hell to get to heaven.” – Dean Karnazes
• “Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.” – Nido Qubein
• “It’s not the mistakes we make that define us, it’s the lessons we learn.” – Oprah Winfrey
• “It is in our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” – Aristotle
• “Recovery didn’t open the gates of heaven and let me in. Recovery opened the gates of hell and let me out!” – Unknown
• “Don’t let the past steal your present.” – Terri Guillemets

• “Recovery is not just a destination, but a beautiful journey of self-discovery.”
• “Every day you choose recovery, you choose the power of resilience over the chains of addiction.”
• “Remember, the addiction is not you, it’s an unwanted guest. And it’s time to show it the exit door.”
• “With every sunrise, remember that you have a fresh chance to write a new chapter in your book of recovery.”
• “Recovery is a testament to your strength. Each day, it is a victory over the shadows of your past.”
• “In the journey of recovery, the most beautiful thing you can wear is your courage.”
• “Embrace your recovery journey, not as a battle to be fought, but as a gift to be cherished.”
• “Your recovery is not defined by the days you fall, but the times you rise back again, stronger than before.”
• “The road to recovery is not straight. It bends, it curves, but remember it always leads to a better place.”
• “Recovery is the art of turning wounds into wisdom.”
• “Every step you take towards recovery is a step towards freedom. Cherish it.”
• “In the journey of recovery, every ‘no’ to drugs is a ‘yes’ to life.”
• “Remember, you’re not recovering from who you are, but from who you thought you had to be.”
• “Recovery isn’t about rushing to the finish line; it’s about embracing the beauty of the journey.”
• “In your journey of recovery, remember you are not just healing yourself, but also creating a path for others.”
• “There is no elevator to recovery. You have to take the stairs, one step at a time.”
• “Even in recovery, there will be storms. But remember, every storm ends and the sun will shine again.”
• “Embrace the struggle, cherish the progress. This is the heart of recovery.”
• “Your journey to recovery is your story, your masterpiece. Paint it with courage and resilience.”
• “Recovery is not about forgetting your past. It’s about accepting it, learning from it, and building a brighter future.”
• “Every day you choose recovery, you are a beacon of hope for those still lost in the darkness.”
• “The pain of recovery is temporary. The joy of freedom is eternal.”
• “Recovery isn’t just about surviving, it’s about thriving.”
• “In the journey of recovery, every step you take is a statement that you are bigger than your addiction.”
• “Believe in your recovery, believe in your strength, and remember, the best is yet to come.”
• “No one said recovery would be easy, but everyone said it would be worth it.”
• “Recovery is your journey, your fight, your victory.”
• “Recovery is your chance to rebuild not just your life, but also your spirit.”
• “In recovery, every day is a testament to your courage and a promise of better days to come.”
• “Recovery is not about being perfect. It’s about progress, one day at a time.”
• “Your recovery journey is your badge of honor, wear it with pride.”
• “Recovery is not a sprint, but a marathon. And every step you take is a victory.”
• “Addiction may have written the first chapters of your life, but you hold the pen to write the rest.”
• “Remember, recovery is not a one-time event but a lifelong commitment to yourself.”
• “Recovery is the dawn after the darkest night. Embrace the new light.”
• “Recovery isn’t about reaching a destination; it’s about enjoying the journey.”
• “Recovery is not about erasing your past, but about embracing your future.”
• “In recovery, remember that you are not alone. Each step you take is supported by countless others.”
• “The path to recovery may seem long and arduous, but the destination is a place of peace.”
• “Every day in recovery is a victory. Celebrate your strength.”
• “Recovery isn’t about getting back to where you were before, it’s about building something better.”
• “Recovery isn’t about escaping the storm, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
• “Every day you choose recovery, you’re choosing to honor the best version of you.”
• “In recovery, every step forward is a step towards the life you deserve.”
• “Recovery isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a testament to your strength.”
• “Your journey of recovery is not a race; take it one day at a time.”
• “Recovery is about breaking chains, not just of substance, but also of self-doubt.”
• “Remember, the journey of recovery is not a solitary one. Reach out, share, and let others in.”
• “Recovery is a journey of self-love. Embrace it, cherish it.”
• “The path to recovery is painted with resilience, perseverance, and an undying spirit of hope.”

In conclusion, recovery is more than just breaking free from the chains of addiction. It’s a journey of self-discovery, self-improvement, and, above all, self-love. Each day, each step, each moment you commit to your recovery, you’re asserting your right to happiness, health, and a fulfilling life.

Remember, the power to change lies within you. And it’s your right and duty to harness that power to create the future you want and deserve. You are not alone in this battle, and the strength you need is already within you, waiting to be unleashed.

Now, as we finish this post, I invite you to take a moment. Reflect on these quotes and let their wisdom seep into your consciousness. Keep them close to your heart as reminders of your resilience and the power you hold over your life.

Write them down, stick them on your mirror, use them as your phone’s wallpaper, or recite them when you feel lost or overwhelmed.

Finally, decide, right now, to take one positive action towards your recovery today. No matter how small or insignificant it may seem, it’s these tiny, daily victories that build up to a life of sobriety, health, and joy. Remember, your recovery journey starts with you , and it begins today.

Hi, I'm Divya. I am the passionate voice behind timetowellbeing.com. I've always been passionate about health and personal growth. I've spent years studying and practicing holistic approaches to wellbeing. I've explored everything from mindfulness and meditation to fitness and nutrition. I strongly believe in the power of self-belief and confidence. I've made it my mission to inspire and empower others. My goal is to help you on your journey to a balanced, fulfilling life. I write engaging, evidence-based articles. These articles offer inspiration and practical tips. They provide supportive advice to readers worldwide. I'm here to guide you on your journey to well-being. I'm excited for us to learn and grow together. Read more about well being here .

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Worth the Read: 75 Meaningful and Inspiring Addiction Recovery Quotes

Inspiring Addiction Quotes that Describe Addiction

Many people don’t realize that they have an addiction to a substance until they try to quit. One of the harshest realities is to acknowledge that you have an addiction. While this chapter in your life may be scary, know that you’re not alone. Plenty of others have gone through the same process, and know what you’re going through. Check out the following addiction quotes that describe what an addiction is.

• “It’s not the drugs that make a drug addict. It’s the need to escape reality.” — Unknown
• “Addiction begins with the hope that something ‘out there’ can instantly fill up the emptiness inside.” — Jean Kilbourne
• “Additions started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life decisions. And they were less intelligent than goldfish.”  — William Gibson
• “At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing — a longing not just of brain, belly or loin, but finally of the heart.” — Cornelius Platinga
• “Addiction is the only prison where the locks are on the inside.” — Unknown
• “Addiction – when you can give up something any time, as long as it’s next Tuesday.” — Nikki Sixx
• “At first, addiction is maintained by pleasure, but the intensity of the pleasure gradually diminishes and the addiction is then maintained by the avoidance of pain.” — Frank Tallis
• “We don’t choose to be addicted; what we choose to do is deny our pain.” — Unknown
• “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a hundred times.” — Mark Twain
• “Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it’s a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it’s a trap.” — Tess Callahan
• “I didn’t even know I was addicted until I tried to stop.” — Unknown
• “The priority of any addict is to anaesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.” — Russell Brand
• “Imagine trying to live without air. Now imagine something worse.” — Amy Reed
• “Addiction: the disease that makes you too selfish to see the havoc that you created or care about the people whose lives you shattered.” — Unknown

If you’re still on the fence about whether you have an addiction or not, complete a self-assessment quiz . These tools provide further insight on whether you have an addiction or not. It is not, however, a medical diagnosis.

“Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.” Take a look at our inpatient program.

Best addiction recovery quotes for those trying to get sober.

Addiction doesn’t only affect you. It also has a profound impact on your family , especially if you have children. If you need an extra kick to get sober, here are some motivating addiction recovery quotes.

• “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” — Chinese Proverb
• “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker
• “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
• “Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” — Carl Bard
• “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
• “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” — Henry Ford
• “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” — Helen Keller
• “Nothing is impossible; the word itself says, ‘I’m possible!’” — Audrey Hepburn
• “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier
• “Every worth act is difficult.” Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.” — Mahatma Gandhi
• “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” — Margaret Thatcher
• “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb
• “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘you cannot paint’, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent Van Gogh
• “The best way out is always through.” — Robert Frost
• “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” — Henry Ford
• “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” — Babe Ruth
• “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” — Muhammad Ali
• “One step at a time. One day at a time. One hour at a time.” — Unknown

“Get your loved one the help they need. Our substance use disorder program accepts many health insurance plans, this is our residential program.”

Addiction is never easy. To get sober, you must want to free yourself from the grasp of addiction.

Popular Recovery Quotes from Celebrities who Struggled with an Addiction

Addiction does not discriminate. It affects people from all classes and all walks of life. Many celebrities, like Demi Lovato and Russell Brand, were functioning addicts . Check out some of the more popular addiction recovery sayings by celebrities below.

• “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.” — Benjamin Alire Sáenz
• “Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don’t ever want to be again.” — Shane Niemeyer
• “I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.” — Samuel L. Jackson
• “The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.” — Russell Brand
• “Remember just because you hit bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.”  — Robert Downey Jr.
• “Recovery is something you have to work on every single day, and it’s something that doesn’t get a day off.” — Demi Lovato
• “I guess the worst day I have had was when I had to stand up in rehab in front of my wife and daughter and say, ‘Hi, my name is Sam, and I am an addict.” — Samuel J. Jackson
• “I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one…” — Cathryn Kemp
• “When you can stop, you don’t want to, and when you to stop, you can’t.” — Luke Davies
• “It is not I who became addicted. It is my body.” — Jean Cocteau
• “One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.” — Brendan F. Behan
• “It was the hardest boyfriend I ever had to break up with.” — Fergie

“We treat both addiction and co-occurring disorders and accept many health insurance plans. Take a look at our inpatient program.”

Many celebrities, like Demi Lovato , have been very forthcoming about their addiction. When struggling to get sober, it helps to know that addiction can affect even the best of us. The journey of these celebrities are often inspiration for those in recovery.

Other Recovery Inspiration Quotes to Stay on the Right Track

Addiction is not something you can get over with ease. It stays with you for your life, which is why relapse prevention is critical in your journey to sobriety. Take a look at these recovery inspiration quotes to keep yourself motivated and on the right track. “Recovery from addiction requires hard work, a proper attitude, and learning skills to stay sober, not drinking alcohol or using other drugs. Successful drug recovery or alcohol recovery involves changing attitudes, acquiring knowledge, and developing skills to meet the many challenges of sobriety.” — Dr. Dennis Daley “I used drugs to feel better. I quit drugs to be better.” — Unknown “Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles, and you have to change it.” — James Lee Curtis “Recovery: It will be challenging. It will be worth it. You will relapse, and that’s ok, as long as you keep fighting.” — Unknown “There is no shame in beginning again, for you to get a chance to build bigger and better than before.” — Unknown “Recovery is not for people who need it. It’s for people who want it.” — Unknown “Never underestimate a recovering addict. We fight for our lives every day in ways most people will never understand.” — Unknown “There’s not a drug on earth that can make life meaningful.” — Unknown “Recovery is a process. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes everything you’ve got.” — Unknown “Be stronger than your strongest excuse.” — Unknown “It’s a beautiful day to be sober.” — Unknown “Someone once told me, ‘I heard you finally got rid of your addiction.’ I smiled and said, ‘No, addiction doesn’t work like that. Once you have it, you will always have it. I just choose not to feed it.” — Unknown “You don’t get over an addiction by stopping using. You recover by creating a new life where it is easier to not use. If you don’t create a new life, then all the factors that brought you to your addiction will catch up with you again.” — Unknown “If you chased your recovery like you chased your high, you would never relapse again.” — Unknown “Drugs take you to hell, disguised as heaven.” — Donald Lyn Frost “It’s gonna get harder before it gets easier, but it will get better. You just gotta make it through the hard stuff first.” — Unknown “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.” — Unknown “It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.” — Unknown “Recovery didn’t open the gates of heaven and let me in. Recovery opened the gates of hell and let me out.” — Unknown “Recovery is about progression, not perfection.” — Unknown “I am not defined by my relapses, but in my decision to remain in recovery despite them.” — Unknown “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” — C.S. Lewis “I understood myself only after I destroyed myself. And only in the process of fixing myself, did I know who I really was.” — Unknown “It is often in the darkest skies that we see the brightest stars.” — Richard Evans “The goal isn’t to be sober. The goal is to love yourself so much that you don’t have to drink.” — Unknown “My recovery must come first, so that everything I love in life does not have to come last.” — Unknown “I’m not telling you it is going to be easy. I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.” — Unknown “It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” — Confucius “No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible.” — George Chakiris Don’t just rely on traditional methods of getting sober. There are plenty of new approaches that hold promise in treating addictions. Know when to seek extra help, and know how to control and cope with cravings for long-term success. Addiction is becoming an epidemic in the U.S. 40 million Americans aged 12 and up are addicted to nicotine, alcohol or other drugs. These numbers are on the rise. It’s time for society to recognize and acknowledge the pain, chaos, and turmoil that addiction causes. Addiction can be deadly. In Washington State, 15 per 100,000 people die from drug-related causes. However, getting sober is not easy. Addiction often has a stronger hold on an addict’s lives than they’d like to believe. There are plenty of ways for staying motivated when getting sober. Find strength within the following addiction quotes and recovery saying. They offer inspiration for those in recovery.

Stand Up to Addiction and Get Sober

Don’t let an addiction control your life any longer. It’s time to stick up to the monster within and seek help getting sober. Print out some of these recovery sayings or recovery quotes, and place them somewhere you can easily see them from. Words can be motivation on getting clean. Speak to one of our counselors to get more information on various treatment options. Take each day one step at a time, and you’ll be sober before you know it.

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Drug and Substance Abuse Essay

Introduction, physiology and psychology of addiction, prescription drug abuse, depressants, hallucinogens.

Drug and substance abuse is an issue that affects entirely all societies in the world. It has both social and economic consequences, which affect directly and indirectly our everyday live. Drug addiction is “a complex disorder characterized by compulsive drug use” (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2010).

It sets in as one form a habit of taking a certain drug. Full-blown drug abuse comes with social problems such as violence, child abuse, homelessness and destruction of families (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2010). To understand to the impact of drug abuse, one needs to explore the reasons why many get addicted and seem unable pull themselves out of this nightmare.

Many experts consider addiction as a disease as it affects a specific part of the brain; the limbic system commonly referred to as the pleasure center. This area, which experts argue to be primitive, is affected by various drug substances, which it gives a higher priority to other things. Peele (1998) argues that alcoholism is a disease that can only be cured from such a perspective (p. 60). Genetics are also seen as a factor in drug addiction even though it has never been exclusively proven.

Other experts view addiction as a state of mind rather than a physiological problem. The environment plays a major role in early stages of addiction. It introduces the agent, in this case the drug, to the abuser who knowingly or otherwise develops dependence to the substance. Environmental factors range from violence, stress to peer pressure.

Moreover, as an individual becomes completely dependent on a substance, any slight withdrawal is bound to be accompanied by symptoms such as pain, which is purely psychological. This is because the victim is under self-deception that survival without the substance in question is almost if not impossible. From his psychological vantage point, Isralowitz (2004) argues that freedom from addiction is achievable provided there is the “right type of guidance and counseling” (p.22).

A doctor as regulated by law usually administers prescription drugs. It may not be certain why many people abuse prescription drugs but the trend is ever increasing. Many people use prescription drugs as directed by a physician but others use purely for leisure. This kind of abuse eventually leads to addiction.

This problem is compounded by the ease of which one can access the drugs from pharmacies and even online. Many people with conditions requiring painkillers, especially the elderly, have a higher risk of getting addicted as their bodies become tolerant to the drugs. Adolescents usually use some prescription drugs and especially painkillers since they induce anxiety among other feelings as will be discussed below.

Stimulants are generally psychoactive drugs used medically to improve alertness, increase physical activity, and elevate blood pressure among other functions. This class of drugs acts by temporarily increasing mental activity resulting to increased awareness, changes in mood and apparently cause the user to have a relaxed feeling. Although their use is closely monitored, they still find their way on the streets and are usually abused.

Getting deeper into the biochemistry of different stimulants, each has a different metabolism in the body affecting different body organs in a specific way. One common thing about stimulants is that they affect the central nervous system in their mechanism. Examples of commonly used stimulants include; cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, amphetamines and cannabis. Cocaine, which has a tremendously high addictive potential, was in the past used as anesthetic and in treatment of depression before its profound effects were later discovered.

On the streets, cocaine is either injected intravenously or smoked. Within a few minutes of use, it stimulates the brain making the user feel euphoric, energetic and increases alertness. It has long-term effects such as seizures, heart attacks and stroke. Cocaine’s withdrawal symptoms range from anxiety, irritability to a strong craving for more cocaine.

Cannabis, also known as marijuana , is the most often abused drug familiar in almost every corner of the world, from the streets of New York to the most remote village in Africa. Although its addiction potential is lower as compared to that of cocaine, prolonged use of cannabis results to an immense craving for more.

It produces hallucinogenic effects, lack of body coordination, and causes a feeling of ecstasy. Long-term use is closely associated with schizophrenia, and other psychological conditions. From a medical perspective, cannabis is used as an analgesic, to stimulate hunger in patients, nausea ameliorator, and intraocular eye pressure reducer. Insomnia, lack of appetite, migraines, restlessness and irritability characterize withdrawal symptoms of cannabis.

Unlike stimulants, depressants reduce anxiety and the central nervous system activity. The most common depressants include barbiturates, benzodiazepines and ethyl alcohol. They are of great therapeutically value especially as tranquilizers or sedatives in reducing anxiety.

Depressants can be highly addictive since they seem to ease tension and bring relaxation. After using depressants for a long time, the body develops tolerance to the drugs. Moreover, body tolerance after continual use requires one use a higher dose to get the same effect. Clumsiness, confusion and a strong craving for the drug accompany gradual withdrawal. Sudden withdrawal causes respiratory complications and can even be fatal.

Narcotics have been used for ages for various ailments and as a pain reliever pain. They are also characterized by their ability to induce sleep and euphoria. Opium, for instance was used in ancient China as a pain reliever and treatment of dysentery and insomnia. Some narcotics such as morphine and codeine are derived from natural sources.

Others are structural analogs to morphine and these include heroin, oxymorphone among others. Narcotics are highly addictive resulting to their strict regulation by a majority of governments. Narcotics act as painkillers once they enter the body.

They are used legally in combination with other drugs as analgesics and antitussives but are abused due to their ability to induce a feeling of well being. Their addiction potential is exceptionally high due to the body’s tolerance after consistent use, forcing the user to use and crave for more to get satisfaction. Increase in respiration rate, diarrhea, anxiety, nausea and lack of appetite are symptoms common to narcotic withdrawal. Others include; running nose, stomach cramps, muscle pains and a strong craving for the drugs.

Hallucinogens affect a person’s thinking capacity causing illusions and behavioral changes especially in moods. They apparently cause someone to hear sounds and see images that do not exist. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which commonly abused hallucinogen, has a low addiction potential because it does not have withdrawal effects. They also affect a person’s sexual behavior and other body functions such as body temperature. There are no outright withdrawal symptoms for hallucinogens.

Isralowitz, R. (2004). Drug use: a reference handbook . Santa Barbara, Clif.: ABC-CLIO. Print.

National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2010). NIDA INfoFacts: Understanding Drug Abuse and Addiction . Web.

Peele, S. (1998). The meaning of Addiction : Compulsive Experience and its Interpretation . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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44 Addiction Recovery Quotes to Inspire You

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Finding the perfect quote for what you’re experiencing right now can be like finding medicine —or magic. This is a list of the 44 most inspirational quotes for addiction recovery. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you—use them. Write them out to post on your wall, make then the wallpaper on your phone or computer, have them printed onto a t-shirt, or recite them to yourself whenever you need a boost.

You have tens of thousands of thoughts running through your head all day—use this list of addiction recovery quotes to make those thoughts as healing as possible.

The Journey of Recovery

Recovery is a lifelong journey of self-discovery, growth, and transformation. Managing addiction requires you to make a thousand different changes in yourself, in your outlook, and in your environment. The person you are at the start of addiction treatment is completely different from the person you’ll become after ten years of sobriety—but it’s still YOU who will make that transformation happen.

  1 . As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world… as in being able to remake ourselves. – Mahatma Gandhi

  2 . My recovery must come first so that everything I love in life doesn’t have to come last. – Anonymous

  3 . Nobody stays recovered unless the life they have created is more rewarding and satisfying than the one they left behind. – Anne Fletcher

  4 . You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew. – Albert Einstein

Addiction is a progressive, chronic, relapsing disease . This is just a fact. It doesn’t mean that everyone in recovery is destined to relapse, but it does mean that if you do relapse, you shouldn’t see it as a failure.

Relapse can be a natural part of the recovery journey, and the circumstances of your relapse might teach you important lessons that you need to learn to stay substance-free for the rest of your life. Maybe you left counseling too soon, maybe you thought you were strong enough to hang out with friends who drink or use, maybe you aren’t taking good enough care of your physical health. Relapse is just a sign that you need to make a change in your life or your treatment.

 5 . If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. – Anonymous

  6 . Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. – Confucius

  7 . I am not defined by my relapses, but by my decision to remain in recovery despite them. – Anonymous

  8 . The best way out is always through. – Robert Frost

Taking It One Day at a Time

Recovery quotes can help you stay on track and boost your motivation.

The phrase “take it one day at a time” so widespread, it’s pretty much become a cliché. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Recovery is a lifelong journey—emphasis on the word journey. There’s no way to skip ahead; you just have to stay in the moment, and take it step by step.

   9 . Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. – Robert Collier

  10 . I personally believe this: We have only today; yesterday’s gone and tomorrow is uncertain. That’s why they call it the present. And sobriety really is a gift… for those who are willing to receive it. – Ace Frehley

  11 . These feelings, no matter how painful, are part of living. Today, we are alive—not anesthetized, not sedated, not passed out. Take control of your feelings and through action you can change. Today, as every day of sober living, we have a choice.  – Ann D. Clark

Motivation and Resilience

To stay strong in recovery requires motivation, and persistence in the face of challenges. You should prepare to overcome discouragement by knowing in advance that your motivation is going to have ups and downs, and you’ll have to keep going anyway.

Resilience, the ability to bounce back despite adversity, is key in addiction recovery . Being able to see both the good and the bad in situations, and sit with the complicated emotions you feel in response, will help you be a better problem solver, and will protect you from destructive stress reactions, such as relapse.

  12 . People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. – Zig Ziglar

  13 . I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’ – Muhammad Ali

  14 . I’m not telling you it is going to be easy, I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it. – Anonymous

  15 . I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. – Georgia O’Keeffe

  16 . If you hear a voice within you say, ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. – Vincent Van Gogh

Friends, Family, and Healing

Part of recovery is transforming your social and home lives. You may have to give up friends who encourage your addictions, and you may need intensive family therapy to work through issues and improve communication with your loved ones. These steps aren’t easy, but they are crucial. Isolating yourself will lead to relapse, not recovery. Human beings need to connect with others to thrive, so it’s important to fix the relationships you can, and replace those you can’t.

A great way to make new, sober connections is to attend peer support groups like AA and NA. You’ll find it surprisingly easy to connect with the people you meet in addiction support groups, because they understand where you’re coming from first hand, and they’re working hard to transform their lives, just like you are. Another great thing about these groups is that they give you the opportunity to help others with their recovery, which can be even more healing than receiving help sometimes.

  17 . Recovery is an ongoing process, for both the addict and his or her family. In recovery, there is hope. And hope is a wonderful thing. – Dean Dauphinais

  18 . A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick. – Brene Brown

  19 . The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but human connection.  – Johann Hari

  20 . Given love and opportunity, every child and adult can recover. All who know this and have the capacity to help others should assist as they can. – Dallin H. Oaks

Plenty of recent studies have shown that gratitude is important for all human beings, no matter their individual challenges. For people in recovery, gratitude is even more important, and sometimes, less easy to come by. But if you make an effort, you can find many things to be grateful for in your recovery , in your life, and in yourself. Making the effort to identify, acknowledge, and value these things is essential to your current and future happiness.

  21 . Gratitude always comes into play; research shows that people are happier if they are grateful for the positive things in their lives, rather than worrying about what might be missing. – Dan Buettner

  22 . The unthankful heart discovers no mercies; but the thankful heart will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings. – Henry Ward Beecher

  23 . The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness. – Dalai Lama

  24 . There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein

Thinking Positive

This list of addiction recovery quotes is all about inspiration, and the great thing about positive thinking is that it allows you to generate your own inspiration from the inside out. Positive thinking has been shown, time and again, to improve recovery outcomes.

You may find it difficult to keep your thoughts from becoming negative—life isn’t perfect after all—but you shouldn’t try to fight it. When your thoughts become negative, recognize that they are just thoughts, not reality. Seeing negativity in this way will help you let go of it in favor of more positive thoughts.

  25 . A negative mind will never give you a positive life. – Zig Ziglar

  26 . Whether you think that you can or that you can’t, you are usually right. – Henry Ford

  27 . Everyone has inside them a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is! – Anne Frank

  28 . The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. – William James

Letting Go of the Past

The weight of the past can be particularly heavy to a person in recovery. This is because the disease of addiction physically alters the brain, and therefore your ability to think logically, to take positive action, to handle stress, and even to experience pleasure. You do things to facilitate drug use that you would never have done otherwise, and your friends and family may start to feel like they don’t even know you anymore.

In recovery, as the damage addiction has done to your brain starts to heal and your thinking starts to clear, it can be easy to beat yourself up about past mistakes—or to drown in the memory of traumatic experiences you were forced to suffer. While it is important to work through issues like these in counseling, and to make amends wherever you can, you cannot let that work spill over into your entire life. You also can’t keep brooding about the past forever. Eventually, the time always comes to let go—for your own good.

  29 . We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here now with the power to shape your day and your future. – Steve Maraboli

  30 . The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. – Chinese proverb

  31 . Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us. – Nicole Reed

  32 . The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. – Socrates

Reclaim Your Power and Ask for Help

It can be easy to feel helpless in the face of addiction; the disease has a way of taking over your life and crowding out everything that doesn’t support drug or alcohol use. It is also a disease that requires professional help to overcome. This is not because you are weak; on the contrary, getting help requires great strength. If you aren’t sure whether you’re strong enough to choose recovery, rest assured, you have the power.

 33 . The most common way people give up power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker

  34 . I really mean when I say my biggest fear in early recovery was that I would never have fun again. The beautiful truth is that recovery has given me freedom and the confidence to go out in the world and leave my own mark. – Tom Stoddart

  35 . I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring. – David Bowie

Bible Verses

If you have faith in a higher power, it can be helpful to call upon that power and remind yourself that you are not the first person to struggle with addiction and temptation over the centuries. Many before you have faced the same challenges you face today and persevered. In your times of challenge you can draw upon your faith and belief in God to help you through the dark times, and to resist the temptations in front of you.

36 . No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation, he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. – 1 Corinthians 10:13

37 . A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls. – Proverbs 25:28

38 . Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. – James 4:7

39 . Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance . – James 1:2

When Times Get Tough

Overcoming addiction isn’t a “one-and-done” situation. You don’t get magically better one day, never to be tempted by your addictions and vices ever again. Instead, sobriety is a process that you must renew every day, and some days are going to be tougher than others. No matter whether you’ve just kicked the habit or are several years clean, there are going to be tough times that tempt you to go back to your bad habits. When those times inevitably occur you must be strong and keep moving forward, one step at a time.

40 . If you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

41 . You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. – Marcus Aurelius

42 . It is only in our darkest hours that we may discover the true strength of the brilliant light within ourselves that can never, ever, be dimmed. — Doe Zantamata

43 . Hard times build determination and inner strength. Through them, we can also come to appreciate the uselessness of anger. — Dalai Lama

44 . My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present. — Steve Goodier

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34 Powerful Anti Drug Quotes: More Than a Simple ‘No’

When I was growing up, society was going through an epic drug scare. The only two answers to the constant barrage of anti drug messaging were to either become completely repulsed by the stuff or to throw yourself into it. Honestly, I’m not sure either one of those paths is correct. That’s why I wanted to present some of the most interesting anti drug quotes I’ve found.

Oftentimes, I find the discourse surrounding substance abuse and addiction to be more than a little accusatory. As you’ll see from some of the anti drug slogans we’ve had over the years, they often rely on encouraging and commanding people not to partake. Even though that’s not an unreasonable request to make, it only paints half of the picture. Hopefully, these quotes will open our eyes enough to make us see the whole thing.

34 Scary Slogans and Thoughtful Anti Drug Quotes

Just say no: famous anti drug quotes and slogans.

#1. “Be all you can be. Go drug-free.”

#2. “Be proud to be drug-free.”

#3. “Crack is whack.”  

#4. “Don’t pass the glass.”

#5. “Don’t snort your life away.”  

#6. “Drugs will cost you more than money.”  

#7. “Getting wasted is a waste of time.”  

#8. “Say nope to dope.”  

#9. “Choose not to use.”  

#10. “LSD is not for me.”  

#11. “Meth is the REAL tooth fairy.”

#12. “Kick it before it kicks you.”  

#13. “Life can take you higher than drugs.”  

#14. “Life is a precious gift, don’t waste it on drugs.”  

#15. “Choose to refuse.”  

#16. “The more you use, the less you live.”  

#17. “Be smart ― don’t start.”  

#18. “It’s easier to stay off drugs than to get off drugs.”  

#19. “D.E.A.D. spells out Drugs End All Dreams.”  

#20. “You use, you lose.”

Anti Drug Quotes That Show Why People Turn to Substance Abuse

#21. “I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

#22. “People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.” ― Wendell Berry

#23. “I was more addicted to self-destruction than to the drugs themselves… something very romantic about it.” ― Gerard Way

#24. “Happiness is not to be found at the bottom of a bottle or from the tip of a needle; it is not to be found amidst a cloud of smoke or within a sugar-coated pill. If you look for it in these places, you will find naught but despair.” ― Wayne Gerard Trotman

#25. “At the bottom of every person’s dependency, there is always pain. Discovering the pain and healing it is an essential step in ending dependency.” ― Chris Prentiss

It Takes Strength to Get Out: Anti Drug Quotes About Addicts

#26. “Sometimes he missed the numbed, walking-underwater feeling that the cocktail of narcotics used to give him. But if a situation went down in here, he was going to need all of his wits to get out of it.” ― R.D. Ronald

#27. “I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one…” ― Cathryn Kemp

#28. “My daughter, Carly, has been in and out of drug treatment facilities since she was thirteen. Every time she goes away, I have a routine: I go through her room and search for drugs she may have left behind. We have a laugh these days because Carly says, ‘So you were looking for drugs I might have left behind? I’m a drug addict, Mother. We don’t leave drugs behind, especially if we’re going into treatment. We do all the drugs. We don’t save drugs back for later. If I have drugs, I do them. All of them. If I had my way, we would stop for more drugs on the way to rehab, and I would do them in the parking lot of the treatment center.’” ― Dina Kucera

#29. “Emotionally wounded addicts have an extremely difficult time with intimacy and with trusting themselves and others. They have a deep desire to trust, but their emotional scars and traumatic memories haunt them whenever an opportunity to trust another person arises. Naturally, this can lead to a very lonely existence.” ― Christopher Dines

#30. “Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem.” ―   Kurt Cobain

The Future is Optimistic: Anti Drug Quotes About Empathy and Healing

#31. “The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics are wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.” ― Russell Brand

#32. “It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behavior.” ― Gabor Mate

#33. “Every person in the AA program who’s successful is living proof that he or she does have power over addictive drugs and alcohol — the power to stop.” ― Chris Prentiss

#34. “It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had ‘brought it on themselves?’” ― Russell Brand

To Conclude

As catchy as anti drug slogans can be, they also tend to be tone-deaf more often than not. Not only that, but many of them come across as accusatory, putting the “blame” on the shoulders of the users, rather than on the circumstances. Today, we know that addiction is influenced by a person’s biology, as well as their environment and development . So we know that some people are simply at a higher risk to develop substance abuse issues.

Fortunately, as I’ve tried to showcase with the anti drug quotes above, we also understand that addiction is curable and even preventable. So if you or one of your loved ones are affected by this illness, don’t despair. And even if you’re not, I hope these quotes will allow you to see those who are with more empathy.

Image Source: Anti drug by Stephen Martin  – Under Creative Commons License

Louise W. Rice

I’m Louise W. Rice, and I can honestly say I didn’t care for quotes all that much throughout my life. In fact, I didn’t actually believe you could gain any inspiration or motivation from merely reading a few lines. Words do have an impact, but to me personally, it was too weak to impress me.

20 Tom Buchanan Quotes of The Self-Control King

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Inspiring Addiction Recovery Quotes

Find inspiration in these addiction recovery quotes. Motivate and empower yourself on the path to sobriety.

Recovering from addiction is a challenging journey that requires strength, resilience, motivation, and determination. In times of struggle, quotes can serve as powerful reminders and sources of inspiration. This section explores the power of quotes in recovery and provides quotes that can help individuals find strength and stay motivated on their path to sobriety.

The Power of Quotes in Recovery

Quotes have the ability to uplift and inspire individuals on their recovery journey. They can provide a sense of hope, encouragement, and understanding. Quotes often come from individuals who have faced their own battles with addiction, making their words relatable and impactful.

Quotes for Strength and Resilience

• "Sometimes you face difficulties not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're doing something right." - Joel Osteen ( Recovered )
• "Rock bottom became the solid foundation in which I rebuilt my life." - J.K. Rowling ( Recovered )
• "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." - Nelson Mandela ( Recovered )

These quotes remind individuals that strength and resilience are key to overcoming the challenges of addiction. They emphasize the importance of perseverance and the ability to rise above setbacks.

Quotes for Motivation and Determination

• "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." - Confucius ( Recovered )
• "I guess the worst day I have had was when I had to stand in front of a judge and talk about my addiction." - Lindsay Lohan ( Ridgeview Hospital )
• "Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child." - Gary Oldman ( Ridgeview Hospital )

These quotes provide motivation and reinforce the importance of determination. They remind individuals that progress is possible, even if it is slow. They also acknowledge the challenges individuals face during their recovery journey.

Quotes can serve as daily reminders, affirmations, and sources of strength for individuals in addiction recovery. These words of wisdom can help individuals stay focused, motivated, and determined to overcome obstacles and maintain their sobriety.

Quotes for Overcoming Challenges

In the journey of addiction recovery, individuals face numerous challenges that test their strength, resilience, and determination. Inspirational quotes can serve as powerful reminders of the inner fortitude needed to overcome these obstacles. Here are some quotes that can provide encouragement and motivation during difficult times.

Quotes on Perseverance and Persistence

• "Sometimes you face difficulties not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're doing something right." - Joel Osteen [1]. This quote highlights the idea that challenges may arise as a result of making positive changes in one's life.
• "Rock bottom became the solid foundation in which I rebuilt my life." - J.K. Rowling [1]. This quote from the renowned author emphasizes the transformative power that can emerge from hitting rock bottom.
• "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." - Nelson Mandela [1]. Mandela's words remind us that it is our ability to rise after setbacks that truly defines our strength.
• "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." - Confucius [1]. This quote encourages individuals to persist in their recovery journey, emphasizing the importance of consistency and determination.

Quotes on Healing and Growth

• "I guess the worst day I have had was when I had to stand in front of a judge and talk about my addiction." - Lindsay Lohan [2]. Lohan's quote acknowledges the difficult moments in the recovery process but also serves as a reminder of the potential for growth and transformation.
• "The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind." - Caroline Myss. This quote speaks to the inherent wisdom within each individual, highlighting the importance of inner healing in the recovery journey.
• "You are not a victim. You are a survivor. And you have the power to change your story." - Unknown. This empowering quote emphasizes the capacity for personal agency and transformation in overcoming challenges.

Quotes on Belief and Self-Confidence

• "Believe you can, and you're halfway there." - Theodore Roosevelt. This quote emphasizes the significance of self-belief and the impact it can have on one's ability to overcome challenges.
• "You are stronger than you think. You have survived all that you have been through. Keep going." - Unknown. This quote serves as a reminder of the inner strength and resilience that individuals possess, even in the face of adversity.
• "Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle." - Christian D. Larson. This quote encourages individuals to trust in their own abilities and to recognize their potential for growth and success.

These quotes can inspire individuals in addiction recovery to persevere, heal, and develop a strong belief in themselves and their ability to overcome challenges. They serve as reminders of the inner strength and resilience that lie within each person on their journey towards lasting recovery.

Quotes for Different Stages of Recovery

The journey of addiction recovery is a challenging and complex one, consisting of various stages that each present their own difficulties and triumphs. Here, we will explore quotes that are specifically tailored to three significant stages of recovery: emotional sobriety, quitting alcohol, and continued sobriety.

Quotes for Emotional Sobriety

Emotional sobriety plays a vital role in the recovery process, as it involves addressing and healing the underlying emotional issues that may have contributed to addiction. Here are some quotes that can provide inspiration and support during this stage:

• "Recovery is not just about abstaining from substances; it's about healing from within." ( Landmark Recovery )
• "Emotional sobriety is the foundation for lasting change and true freedom." ( Banyan Treatment Center )
• "Healing begins when we face our emotions with courage and compassion." ( Banyan Treatment Center )

These quotes remind individuals in the early stages of recovery that addressing their emotional well-being is an essential part of the healing process.

Quotes for Quitting Alcohol

Quitting alcohol is a significant milestone in addiction recovery. It requires determination, strength, and support. Here are some quotes that can offer motivation during this challenging phase:

• "Quitting alcohol is not giving up; it's taking back control of your life." ( Landmark Recovery )
• "You are stronger than you think. Don't let alcohol define you." ( Banyan Treatment Center )
• "Sobriety is a gift you give yourself every day." ( Banyan Treatment Center )

These quotes serve as a reminder that quitting alcohol is a courageous choice that leads to a healthier and more fulfilling life.

Quotes for Continued Sobriety

Maintaining sobriety is an ongoing journey that requires dedication and perseverance. Here are some quotes to provide inspiration during this stage:

• "Every day of sobriety is a victory worth celebrating." ( Landmark Recovery )
• "You are not alone in this journey. Keep going, and you'll continue to grow." ( Banyan Treatment Center )
• "With each sober day, you are rewriting your story and creating a brighter future." ( Banyan Treatment Center )

These quotes serve as a reminder that each day of sobriety is an accomplishment and an opportunity for personal growth and transformation.

Incorporating inspiring quotes into your recovery journey can provide motivation, perspective, and a sense of community. Remember that everyone's path to recovery is unique, and finding the quotes that resonate with you can help support your ongoing progress.

Quotes for Daily Struggles and Victories

During the journey of addiction recovery, each day brings its own set of challenges and triumphs. Drawing inspiration from quotes can provide the necessary encouragement and motivation to navigate the daily struggles and celebrate the victories along the way. Here are some inspiring quotes to help individuals on their path to sobriety.

Quotes on the Daily Battle for Sobriety

"The daily battle for sobriety is a familiar struggle for many recovering addicts, with the threat of relapse remaining present, even for those years into their sobriety. Each day of sobriety is considered a victory in this ongoing battle."

• "Every day is a new chance to choose sobriety and rewrite my story."
• "The battle for sobriety is fought one day at a time."
• "Each sunrise brings a fresh opportunity to embrace a sober life."
• "In the daily struggle for sobriety, I discover my strength and resilience."

Quotes on Overcoming Temptation and Relapse

"The daily battle for sobriety is an all-too-familiar struggle for many recovering addicts. Even those years into their sobriety, the threat of relapse remains lurking in their day-to-day lives. If you ever feel this way, know that plenty of people are dealing with the same struggle and that each day of sobriety is another victory."

• "In moments of temptation, I remind myself of the life I'm building in recovery."
• "I choose to break free from the chains of addiction, one temptation at a time."
• "My sobriety is worth fighting for, even when the pull of the past is strong."
• "With each temptation overcome, I grow stronger in my sobriety journey."

Quotes on Finding Strength in Each Day

"The daily battle for sobriety is a familiar struggle for many recovering addicts, with the threat of relapse remaining present, even for those years into their sobriety." ( Landmark Recovery )

• "Every new day is an opportunity to discover my inner strength and embrace sobriety."
• "In the face of adversity, I find the strength to stay committed to my recovery."
• "Each day brings a chance to rebuild, renew, and rediscover myself in sobriety."
• "With each sunrise, I am reminded of the resilience within me that fuels my journey of sobriety."

These quotes serve as powerful reminders of the daily struggles and victories that individuals face on their path to addiction recovery. They offer encouragement, motivation, and strength to overcome challenges, resist temptation, and find solace in the journey toward a healthier, sober life.

Seeking Support beyond Quotes

While addiction recovery quotes can provide inspiration and motivation, seeking additional support is essential for a successful journey towards sobriety. There are various therapeutic solutions and treatment options available to individuals in need of help and guidance.

Therapeutic Solutions for Addiction Recovery

Therapy plays a crucial role in addiction recovery, providing individuals with the tools and support they need to overcome the challenges they face. Different therapeutic approaches, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and motivational interviewing, can help individuals address the underlying issues contributing to their addiction and develop healthier coping mechanisms. Through therapy, individuals can gain insight, learn valuable skills, and receive guidance from experienced professionals.

Inpatient Treatment for Lasting Recovery

For individuals struggling with severe addiction or those who require a structured and immersive environment, inpatient treatment is a valuable option. Inpatient treatment programs provide round-the-clock care and support in a residential setting. These programs offer a comprehensive approach to recovery, including therapy, medical supervision, group support, and skill-building activities. Inpatient treatment can provide a safe and structured environment for individuals to focus solely on their recovery without distractions or temptations.

Personalized Support for Sobriety

Personalized support is crucial for individuals in addiction recovery. This may include outpatient treatment programs, support groups, and individual counseling. Outpatient treatment allows individuals to receive comprehensive care while still maintaining their daily routines. Support groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA), provide a sense of community and a platform for individuals to share their experiences, struggles, and successes with others who can relate. Individual counseling sessions can provide a more tailored and focused approach, addressing specific challenges and providing personalized guidance.

If you or someone you know is seeking support beyond quotes and requires help with drug or alcohol addiction, professional assistance is available. Organizations like Landmark Recovery offer confidential and individualized treatment options to support individuals on their recovery journey. By reaching out to a Patient Navigator at 888-448-0302, individuals can access the help and resources they need in a supportive and caring environment.

Remember, addiction recovery is a challenging process, but with the right support and resources, individuals can achieve lasting sobriety and lead fulfilling lives.

[1]: https://recovered.org/blog/100-inspiring-recovery-quotes ‍ [2]: https://ridgeviewhospital.net/addiction-recovery-quotes/

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Drug Addiction — Drug Addiction: Choice or Disease?

Drug Addiction: Choice Or Disease?

• Categories: Drug Addiction Drugs

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Published: Sep 16, 2023

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The choice argument, the disease model, psychological and sociological factors, a holistic perspective.

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The Effects of Drug Addiction on the Brain and Body

Signs of drug addiction, effects of drug addiction.

Drug addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease that involves complex interactions between a person’s environment, brain circuits, genetics, and life experiences.

People with drug addictions continue to use drugs compulsively, despite the negative effects.

Substance abuse has many potential consequences, including overdose and death. Learn about the effects of drug addiction on the mind and body and treatment options that can help.

Verywell / Theresa Chiechi

Drug Abuse vs. Drug Addiction

While the terms “drug abuse” and “drug addiction” are often used interchangeably, they're different. Someone who abuses drugs uses a substance too much, too frequently, or in otherwise unhealthy ways. However, they ultimately have control over their substance use.

Someone with a drug addiction uses drugs in a way that affects many parts of their life and causes major disruptions. They can't stop using drugs, even if they want to.

The signs of drug abuse and addiction include changes in behavior, personality, and physical appearance. If you’re concerned about a loved one’s substance use, here are some of the red flags to watch out for:

• Changes in school or work performance
• Secretiveness 
• Relationship problems
• Risk-taking behavior
• Legal problems
• Aggression 
• Mood swings
• Changes in hobbies or friends
• Sudden weight loss or gain
• Unexplained odors on the body or clothing

Drug Addiction in Men and Women

Men and women are equally likely to develop drug addictions. However, men are more likely than women to use illicit drugs, die from a drug overdose, and visit an emergency room for addiction-related health reasons. Women are more susceptible to intense cravings and repeated relapses.

People can become addicted to any psychoactive ("mind-altering") substance. Common addictive substances include alcohol , tobacco ( nicotine ), stimulants, hallucinogens, and opioids .

Many of the effects of drug addiction are similar, no matter what substance someone uses. The following are some of the most common effects of drug addiction.

Effects of Drug Addiction on the Body

Drug addiction can lead to a variety of physical consequences ranging in seriousness from drowsiness to organ damage and death:

• Shallow breathing
• Elevated body temperature
• Rapid heart rate
• Increased blood pressure
• Impaired coordination and slurred speech
• Decreased or increased appetite
• Tooth decay
• Skin damage
• Sexual dysfunction
• Infertility
• Kidney damage
• Liver damage and cirrhosis
• Various forms of cancer
• Cardiovascular problems
• Lung problems
• Overdose and death

If left untreated drug addiction can lead to serious, life-altering effects on the body.

Dependence and withdrawal also affect the body:

• Physical dependence : Refers to the reliance on a substance to function day to day. People can become physically dependent on a substance fairly quickly. Dependence does not always mean someone is addicted, but the longer someone uses drugs, the more likely their dependency is to become an addiction.
• Withdrawal : When someone with a dependence stops using a drug, they can experience withdrawal symptoms like excessive sweating, tremors, panic, difficulty breathing, fatigue , irritability, and flu-like symptoms.

Overdose Deaths in the United States

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 100,000 people in the U.S. died from a drug overdose in 2021.

Effects of Drug Addiction on the Brain

All basic functions in the body are regulated by the brain. But, more than that, your brain is who you are. It controls how you interpret and respond to life experiences and the ways you behave as a result of undergoing those experiences.

Drugs alter important areas of the brain. When someone continues to use drugs, their health can deteriorate both psychologically and neurologically.

Some of the most common mental effects of drug addiction are:

• Cognitive decline
• Memory loss
• Mood changes and paranoia
• Poor self/impulse control
• Disruption to areas of the brain controlling basic functions (heart rate, breathing, sleep, etc.)

Effects of Drug Addiction on Behavior

Psychoactive substances affect the parts of the brain that involve reward, pleasure, and risk. They produce a sense of euphoria and well-being by flooding the brain with dopamine .

This leads people to compulsively use drugs in search of another euphoric “high.” The consequences of these neurological changes can be either temporary or permanent. 

• Difficulty concentrating
• Irritability 
• Angry outbursts
• Lack of inhibition 
• Decreased pleasure/enjoyment in daily life (e.g., eating, socializing, and sex)
• Hallucinations

Help Someone With Drug Addiction

If you suspect that a loved one is experiencing drug addiction, address your concerns honestly, non-confrontationally, and without judgment. Focus on building trust and maintaining an open line of communication while setting healthy boundaries to keep yourself and others safe. If you need help, contact the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357.

Effects of Drug Addiction on an Unborn Child

Drug addiction during pregnancy can cause serious negative outcomes for both mother and child, including:

• Preterm birth
• Maternal mortality

Drug addiction during pregnancy can lead to neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) . Essentially, the baby goes into withdrawal after birth. Symptoms of NAS differ depending on which drug has been used but can include:

• Excessive crying
• Sleeping and feeding issues

Children exposed to drugs before birth may go on to develop issues with behavior, attention, and thinking. It's unclear whether prenatal drug exposure continues to affect behavior and the brain beyond adolescence.  

While there is no single “cure” for drug addiction, there are ways to treat it. Treatment can help you control your addiction and stay drug-free. The primary methods of treating drug addiction include:

• Psychotherapy : Psychotherapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or family therapy , can help someone with a drug addiction develop healthier ways of thinking and behaving.
• Behavioral therapy : Common behavioral therapies for drug addiction include motivational enhancement therapy (MET) and contingency management (CM). These therapy approaches build coping skills and provide positive reinforcement.
• Medication : Certain prescribed medications help to ease withdrawal symptoms. Some examples are naltrexone (for alcohol), bupropion (for nicotine), and methadone (for opioids).
• Hospitalization : Some people with drug addiction might need to be hospitalized to detox from a substance before beginning long-term treatment.
• Support groups : Peer support and self-help groups, such as 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, can help people with drug addictions find support, resources, and accountability.

A combination of medication and behavioral therapy has been found to have the highest success rates in preventing relapse and promoting recovery. Forming an individualized treatment plan with your healthcare provider's help is likely to be the most effective approach.

Drug addiction is a complex, chronic medical disease that causes someone to compulsively use psychoactive substances despite the negative consequences.

Some effects of drug abuse and addiction include changes in appetite, mood, and sleep patterns. More serious health issues such as cognitive decline, major organ damage, overdose, and death are also risks. Addiction to drugs while pregnant can lead to serious outcomes for both mother and child.

Treatment for drug addiction may involve psychotherapy , medication, hospitalization, support groups, or a combination.

If you or someone you know is experiencing substance abuse or addiction, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357.

American Society of Addiction Medicine. Definition of addiction .

HelpGuide.org. Drug Abuse and Addiction .

Tennessee Department of Mental Health & Substance Abuse Services. Warning signs of drug abuse .

National Institute on Drug Abuse. Sex and gender differences in substance use .

Cleveland Clinic. Drug addiction .

National Institute on Drug Abuse. Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction Drugs and the Brain .

American Heart Association. Illegal Drugs and Heart Disease .

American Addiction Centers. Get the facts on substance abuse .

Szalavitz M, Rigg KK, Wakeman SE. Drug dependence is not addiction-and it matters . Ann Med . 2021;53(1):1989-1992. doi:10.1080/07853890.2021.1995623

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. top 100,000 annually .

American Psychological Association. Cognition is central to drug addiction .

National Institute on Drug Abuse. Understanding Drug Use and Addiction DrugFacts .

MedlinePlus. Neonatal abstinence syndrome .

National Institute on Drug Abuse. Treatment and recovery .

Grella CE, Stein JA.  Remission from substance dependence: differences between individuals in a general population longitudinal survey who do and do not seek help . Drug and Alcohol Dependence.  2013;133(1):146-153. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2013.05.019

By Laura Dorwart Dr. Dorwart has a Ph.D. from UC San Diego and is a health journalist interested in mental health, pregnancy, and disability rights.

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Drug Addiction Quotes

Are you struggling with an addiction or substance use disorder if you or someone you love is fighting against substance abuse, the following addiction quotes will help on the journey towards recovery. for even more support, contact us today at we level up tx for addiction treatment options. when you are fighting with an addiction, […].

Are you struggling with an addiction or substance use disorder ? If you or someone you love is fighting against substance abuse, the following addiction quotes will help on the journey towards recovery. For even more support, contact us today at We Level Up TX for addiction treatment options .

When you are fighting with an addiction, every bit of support is more than welcome. When the battle gets tough, it can be quite helpful to read or listen to inspirational individuals who successfully overcame their addiction.

Drug Addict Boyfriend Quotes

• “Substance abuse is a very real trap. Drugs and alcohol are very much like an abusive lover who treats you well at first and then beats you up, apologizes, gives you nice treatment for a while, and then beats you up again. The trap is in trying to hang in there for the good while trying to overlook the bad. Wrong. This can never work.“ – Clarissa Pinkola Estés
• “It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behavior.“ – Gabor Mate
• “Recovery is a process. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes everything you’ve got.“ – Unknown
• “Addiction brings apathy. Break the apathy, and you break the addiction.“ – Mango Wodzak
• “No one consciously chooses addiction to a substance or behavior over his partner. There are always reasons – powerful ones – why a person retreats into addiction.“ – Christopher Kennedy Lawford

Drug Addiction Quotes Family

• “I guess the worst day I have had was when I had to stand up in rehab in front of my wife and daughter and say, ‘Hi, my name is Sam, and I am an addict.“ – Samuel J. Jackson
• “Human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with whatever we can find … It is disconnection that drives addiction.“ – Christopher Kennedy Lawford
• “Your decision to kill your addiction will become a reality only if you believe and reinforce the fact that you have the capacity to do it.“ – Oche Otorkpa
• “Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.“ – Brené Brown

Loving a Drug Addict Quotes

• “It takes a strong person to stand up to his or her fate and overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom and success, but I believe in you.“ – Pax Prentiss
• “Recovery is not for people who need it. It’s for people who want it.“ – Unknown
• “Unless an addict wants to quit, they’ll find a way to get drugs, and as soon as they leave the rehab facility they’ll pick up where they left off.“ – Mitch Winehouse
• “It’s not the drugs that make a drug addict. It’s the need to escape reality.“ – Unknown
• “There is always a decision. Take responsibility for it. Addict or human. It’s a decision. Each and every time.“ – James Frey
• “What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood“ – Alice Miller

Inspirational Quotes for Drug Addicts

• It is easier to stay out than get out. – Mark Twain
• “I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: ‘Wait a minute – if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?’ And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk.“ – Craig Ferguson
• “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.“ – C.S. Lewis
• “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.“ – Benjamin Alire Sáenz
• “Drugs take you to hell, disguised as heaven.“ – Donald Lyn Frost
• “I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.“ – Frida Kahlo
• “One of the hardest things was learning that I was worth recovery.“ – Demi Lovato

• “I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one…“ – Cathryn Kemp
• “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors.“ – Gabor Mate
• “For all the alcoholics and addicts out there, you are loved, stop being so stubborn and come in from the cold. Wherever you are, there is a brighter light in your sight. Move towards it every day, and keep moving towards it. Even the worst and strongest addiction is a choice – a choice not to fight, to give up, to indulge the impulse, or instead to accept the hands offered you to help.“ – Dave Pryor
• “I used drugs to feel better. I quit drugs to be better.“ – Unknown
• “Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.“ – William S. Burroughs
• “Addictions… started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were… less intelligent than goldfish“ – William Gibson

Drug Addicted Parents Quotes

• “Imperfect parenting does not cause addiction. If that were so, everyone would be one.“ – Sandy Swenson
• “It’s like an addiction, one I battle every day. It appeared at first drink. I was becoming the very thing I feared – my father’s son. I wanted to be as far away from that Threshold as possible. I swore I’d never take another sip, no matter how crazy it made me. No matter how much it called to me. Resisting became easier with time.“ – Sara Ella
• “You cannot quite understand the power of addiction until you have seen it firsthand. Until you have seen it eat like acid through everything you are. It is astounding to watch. Its slow and total corrosion of your entire life is mesmerizing. As you watch it, you keep thinking, “At some point, the corrosion will stop. There is no way it will be able to eat through this next thing. This next thing is too important to me.” But then it does. It eats through everything. And you realize you are dealing with a vast and inhuman power.“ – Mother Horse Eyes

Inspirational Quotes for Recovering Drug Addict

• Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self- respect and everything that goes along with with your self esteem. – Kurt Cobain
• Alcoholism is a disease that creates temporary madness and insanity. Drug addiction is a disease that destroys health and humanity. – Dr T.P.Chia
• People try drugs out of curiosity, to have a good time, to improve athletic performance, or to escape from stress, anxiety or depression, but all drug addicts are willful victims themselves. – Dr T.P.Chia
• Don’t do drugs because if you do drugs you’ll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison. – John Hardwick
• I’m very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful. – Jim Carrey
• “Recovery from addiction requires hard work, a proper attitude, and learning skills to stay sober, not drinking alcohol or using other drugs. Successful drug recovery or alcohol recovery involves changing attitudes, acquiring knowledge, and developing skills to meet the many challenges of sobriety.“ – Dr. Dennis Daley

“You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.“ Chris Prentiss

• “Addiction, at its worst, is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. You’re like a hostage who has developed an irrational affection for your captor. They can abuse you, torture you, even threaten to kill you, and you’ll remain inexplicably and disturbingly loyal.“ – Anne Clendening
• “Never underestimate a recovering addict. We fight for our lives every day in ways most people will never understand.“ – Unknown
• “I didn’t even know I was addicted until I tried to stop.“ – Unknown
• “Someone once told me, ‘I heard you finally got rid of your addiction.’ I smiled and said, ‘No, addiction doesn’t work like that. Once you have it, you will always have it. I just choose not to feed it.“ – Unknown

I hope you enjoyed this collection of drug addiction quotes . Don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. The very first step towards recovery is to seek help. 

The fight against addiction is so difficult because the behavior is deeply rooted in the brain. Even worse, most addictions develop their tight grasp slowly over time. For this reason, many addicts do not even recognize that they have become addicted.

However, the first step towards recovery is the acknowledgment that one is addicted. The second and perhaps even more important step is to seek help. Without such help, the battle against an addiction becomes even more difficult.

105 Inspirational Addiction Quotes for Your Recovery – http://www.planetofsuccess.com/blog/2019/addiction-quotes/ We Level Up » Depression and Anxiety Quotes, Effective Treatment and Recovery Inspirations

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This Is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws

The war on drugs failed, but decriminalization is facing its own backlash. what’s next.

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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

In 2020, voters in Oregon passed a ballot measure, a drug reform policy, that was beyond what I ever thought would pass in any state in America.

Overnight, Oregon became the first state in the country to decriminalize most street drugs.

Even drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth, and oxycodone.

It’s a sea change. Measure 110, which was passed by 58 percent of Oregon voters, treats active drug users as potential patients rather than criminals.

I’ve been involved in drug policy reform for a long time. I got into it in high school. And this was not a politics that seemed possible back then. In that era, the idea that you would have a state decriminalize heroin possession, I mean, it was unthinkable. But in the coming decades, there would be a real turn on the war on drugs — the overpolicing, the mass incarceration, the racism, the broken families. It was not achieving, as far as anybody could tell, anybody’s policy goals.

So we began to move in this other direction. Oregon was at the vanguard of this, but it wasn’t alone. In Washington state, you saw the Supreme Court overturn the law that had made a lot of drug possessions and felonies. In a bunch of different cities, you had these very liberal district attorneys who instead of running on tough on crime platforms were running against overpolicing, against mass incarceration.

Something that had really never been tried before in America was all of a sudden being tried. We were moving towards a radically different equilibrium than anybody had imagined even just a few years before on drugs. I mean, you could walk down the streets — you can right now in many states — and buy all kinds of cannabis products from shops. It was, again, unthinkable.

But this politics and these policies are not working out the way people had hoped. Chesa Boudin, who was the district attorney in San Francisco, one of these very liberal set of reformers, he was recalled. Legislation was passed rebuilding an enforcement structure around drugs in Washington state. There are a lot of concerns and, I think, quite bright ones about how cannabis legalization and particularly cannabis commercialization is working out in a bunch of places.

And in Oregon, Measure 110 was gutted. The results of it had not been what many of the advocates had hoped for. Drug policy feels very unsettled to me right now. The war on drugs was a failure, often a cruel one. The war on the war on drugs has not been the success its advocates had hoped. So what comes next?

Keith Humphreys is a professor at Stanford University who specializes in addiction and drug policy. He’s advised the White House, California, the UK. I always find that he balances compassion and rigor unusually well. So I wanted to have him walk me through what he has seen and where he’s landed. As always, my email for guest suggestions, for reflections, [email protected].

Keith Humphreys, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ezra. Good to talk to you.

There’s a tendency to just use this term “drugs.” And that tendency just belies a huge amount of variation, I think, in how people think about different drugs, how they think about opioids, how they think about stimulants, how they think about psychedelics, how they think about cannabis, alcohol, caffeine. Is this a useful term?

So “drug” is an incredibly vague term that covers an enormous number of drugs that have very different properties. The biggest one, I think, is the capacity to instill addiction. People don’t get addicted to LSD, for example. But they do get addicted to heroin. That’s really important. They do get addicted to nicotine. That’s really important. So you would think about those drugs differently, the ones that have the ability to generate an illness with obsessive compulsion to use in the face of destructive consequences over and over and over again. Those belong in their own class, I think.

The second thing is that we should stop pretending that legal and illegal drugs are so different for lots of reasons. We could learn much more about what to do with illegal drugs if we looked at legal drugs. When I talk to policymakers, they say, well, I know what I don’t want. And that’s a carceral, racist war on drugs. I say, OK, I’m glad that option is off the table. That, of course, leaves millions and millions of other options to choose from.

And how some people have framed that is there’s really only two choices here. You can have that, that horrible thing. Or you can throw the switch the other way — tolerance, acceptance, public sale. And that’s going to be better.

And the problem with that argument, even before we get into what happened in places like Oregon, is the number one drug that kills people on the planet is cigarettes. The number one drug associated with arrests, violence, and incarceration is alcohol. Those drugs are legal. It’s not that drugs suddenly become easy to deal with once they’re legal.

You get to pick the set of problems you have, as our mutual friend Mark Kleiman used to say. But you don’t get to get rid of those problems. So people are right to identify substantial costs to prohibition of drugs or for that matter of everything. But that is different than saying there is some other framework that doesn’t also include pretty substantial costs.

So this major drug policy reform went into effect in Oregon in 2021, Measure 110. It passes. What happens next?

Part of what happens is exactly what the reformers hoped would happen, which is that there’s a dramatic drop in arrests — arrests for drug possession and arrests for drug dealing. So they say, wow, that’s a victory. On the other hand, some of the other aspects of it didn’t work out the way people planned.

So there was a system that they thought would encourage people to enter treatment in replacement of criminal penalties. You’d be written a ticket, let’s say, if you were using fentanyl on a park bench. And it said there’s $100 fine for doing this, but you don’t have to pay the fine. All you have to do is call this toll free number, and you can get a health assessment and a potential referral to treatment. Well, it turned out that over 95 percent of the people got those tickets simply threw them away, which, keeping with the spirit of the law, there was no consequence for doing that. Hardly anybody called. The new body they set up to distribute the new funds had very serious management problems because the people — they may have been terrific human beings, but they weren’t actually experienced in how do you run a government bureaucracy.

So there was no real improvement in the availability of treatment, no real improvement in the number of people interested in seeking it. And those things may well have contributed to Oregon having a very high overdose rate. So currently going up about 40 percent per year, 4-0. Of course, some of that is due to fentanyl, which is raising — I’m here in California. Our rate’s up 5 percent, but it’s certainly not up 40 percent.

And the last thing is the intangible. And I say this as someone who goes to Oregon a lot and talks to people there almost every week, which is just the change in neighborhoods was really palpable of what it was like to go out in the street or try to go to a park, how much visible drug use you saw, how much disorder connected to it. And this was accentuated even further by the pandemic. There were fewer people on the street who had the choice. So the experience became more frightening as people were perhaps outnumbered in their neighborhood by people who had clearly visible problems were using drugs. And that generated significant and, I think, understandable upset as to how things were going in Oregon.

So not everybody agrees that Measure 110 was a failure, certainly not as a policy. I mean, it definitely failed politically. The Drug Policy Alliance says that it failed because of disinformation because there was a concerted effort to undermine it. And they cite data from the Oregon Health Authority saying that, look, health needs screenings increased by almost 300 percent. Substance use disorder treatment increased by 143 percent. Is there some argument to this that we’re looking at the wrong measures and, judged according to its goals, 110 was actually kind of working?

If what you care about the most was a drop in drug arrests and involvement of people who use drugs and deal drugs in the criminal justice system, then it was a success clearly because there was very little contact anymore between law enforcement and people who sell and deal drugs. But on the health side, no, I don’t think that. And those statistics on treatment I believe count a lot of one time consultations. I think what most people, particularly people who love someone who has an addiction, are looking for is evidence on people getting better, people getting into recovery, not just at some point having some transitory contact with the system.

There’s another argument that’s made in the Drug Policy Alliance document and other things I’ve seen and that has occurred to me, too, because when I think about Oregon, when I think about San Francisco, when I think about Washington State, I mean, you’re talking about places with very broken housing markets. We’ll talk I’m sure more about the Tenderloin.

But the Tenderloin is dystopic in the way the Tenderloin is dystopic because it is a giant homeless encampment. And that was true well before the current wave of drug policy liberalization. And so one argument here is that the drug system is being blamed for policymakers’ inability to solve these other problems. Is there something to that?

There’s an intense argument out here in the Bay Area between people who say, look, the homeless crisis is just a side effect of addiction. And people say, look, the addiction crisis is just a side effect of homelessness. And I would say they’re both wrong in that, even within my personal group of acquaintances, I know people who lost their home because of an addiction. And it’s not that the housing market discharged them, they had an empty property. But they were out on the streets. And then there are people who lost their housing and then were living next to drug markets on the streets and developed an addiction there.

So I don’t think we can separate that Gordian knot. And I don’t know if in policy terms we have to. I mean, I think we should be able to pursue policies that increase the access to housing and still work on policies that reduce the damage from addiction.

So to go back to Oregon and one of the theories that was operating there was that we’re going to move more money into treatment. We’re going to make it easier and safer in the sense that you will not be arrested for seeking treatment. We’re going to make it easier and safer for you to seek treatment. We’re going to make it cheap to seek treatment. Why didn’t more people seek treatment?

That theory reflects a misunderstanding about the nature of addiction, which is that it is like, say, chronic pain or depression, conditions that feel lousy for the person who has them all day long, and they will do anything to get rid of them. Drug addiction is not like that. It has many painful experiences. It destroys people’s lives.

But drug use feels in the short term incredibly good. That is why people do it. They’re getting intense reward. So they are ambivalent about giving that up in a way no one with chronic pain is ambivalent about giving up chronic pain and no one with depression is ambivalent about giving up depression.

The other point about it is a huge number of the problems from drug use and addiction fall on other people rather than the person concerned. And so people like me who work in this field, we get calls and calls and calls from mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children concerned about their loved ones. But it’s very rare we get a call from somebody concerned about their own use.

Take the law out of it and look at a drug that is legal and widely accepted. Studies of people who seek treatment for an alcohol problem, slightly over 9 in 10 of those people say they were pressured to come. And the pressure might be family pressure, mom and dad said or my spouse said, this keeps up, I’m moving out. The boss said, one more day drunk at work, and you’re fired. Doctor said, you keep doing this, you will be dead in six months. It could be this is your fourth or fifth arrest for drunk driving, and your lawyer says, you better get into treatment because the judge otherwise might throw you in the penitentiary. That is overwhelmingly the situation of people seeking treatment — pressure from outside.

So let’s just remove all pressure. No legal pressure, no disapproval. Then people will spontaneously say, OK, I really want to make a change, and I’ll come in. Look, those of us who do this for a living, we pray for patients like that. It’s great when they come in, but that is just a very rare person.

Let me ask about this from the other direction, which is maybe this all just wasn’t nearly liberal enough because one of the arguments made — and I do think there’s evidence behind it — is people are getting stuff they don’t know. And the reason people die from fentanyl laced heroin or simply fentanyl that they thought was heroin is because they don’t have a source they can trust. Part of the difficulty here is, yes, people end up addicted. We don’t have really good treatments for addiction that we can come back to whether you think that is a true claim.

And then we also make it very difficult for people and dangerous for people to get what they need to avoid withdrawal to keep feeling normal. And if we made that easier on them, if we made it so they didn’t have to go to a place like the Tenderloin and instead get something safe, they would not die from overdose. They would not die from fentanyl laced heroin. Is there validity to that?

Yeah, well, certainly using fentanyl in an illicit market is extraordinarily dangerous. And my colleagues and I are trying to figure out the death rate per year of a regular user. It might be as high as 5 percent. So that is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do.

And the arguments you’re making have been influential in this region to the point that if you go up slightly even further in the Pacific Northwest into Canada and British Columbia, they’ve gone so far to say it’s the government’s job to supply these drugs because prohibition makes things more dangerous, so we have a positive obligation to do this. But the problem with that reasoning is we did flood communities with legally made, consistent quality, clearly labeled opioids for years. And the net effect was millions of people getting addicted and hundreds of thousands of people dying.

That’s, in fact, how we got here. I think everyone knows what OxyContin is, all the other opioids that were really pushed out there. So it’s just really hard to sustain that argument that at a population level, huge access to addictive drugs is not going to cause a lot of addiction and overdose as long as they’re clearly labeled and of consistent quality. If that were true, we would never had an opioid crisis.

So Measure 110 passes in 2020. It goes into effect in 2021. What happens to it in 2023?

At that point, overdoses were way up. And popular sentiment has shifted pretty dramatically. I think quite a few people felt burned. They hadn’t gotten what they’d been promised. And that included people who, for example, had relatives who were addicted who they assume would be getting into treatment and recovery and then weren’t able to get services.

Neighborhoods are decaying. Polling showed that about two thirds of the Oregon population wanted Measure 110 repealed in part or in whole. And interestingly, those sentiments were even stronger among Black and Hispanic Oregon residents.

In response to all this, both Houses by very large margins replaced Measure 110 with a different approach to drug policy. It restored the ability to impose criminal penalties, to use those penalties particularly to leverage people to change their behavior — for example, by restoring drug courts and other kinds of diversion and monitoring programs. It is definitely not correct to say they reinstated the war on drugs because, it has to be remembered, Oregon never really had a war on drugs policy. They were the first state in the nation to decriminalize marijuana over 50 years ago, in fact. They decriminalized marijuana. They had a very low rate of putting nonviolent criminals into prisons.

So it was more a restoration of that progressive, liberty loving approach that they’d had before but supplemented with a lot more funding for treatment, which is something they’ve had a lot of problems standing up for years, which had nothing to do with Measure 110. The treatment system was in very bad shape before Measure 110. And it still is.

If you’ve been around drug policy conversations for a long time, you’ll have heard a lot, I have heard a lot, about Portugal. And Portugal is a place where they decriminalized drugs. And it has been a much more sustainable, solid policy. So what is different about Portugal?

Portugal is different in policy and different in culture. So they definitely don’t throw people in prison, and it’s decriminalized. But they do have what are called dissuasion commissions that do assessments of people, say, who arrested in the street for using drugs. And you have to show up to this assessment. And they can push and nudge people to seek care.

And they can also apply penalties if they want to. They can say, you’re a cab driver. You’ve been caught using cocaine. And we’re going to take your cab license away until you seek treatment and stop using cocaine. Things like that. It is not a war on drugs approach, but it is a push in the policy. And that has never been taken on seriously by American advocates who cite Portugal.

Portugal also has a universal health care. We do not have that. We are the only developed Western country that doesn’t have that. So that makes it easier to get help irrespective of what the laws are. And Portugal had at least at the time of their decriminalization a very nice network of treatment services and harm reduction services for people. And all that together worked in the policy mix.

The other point is the culture of Portugal is much more family oriented. It’s much more communitarian than American general and certainly much more true than our freedom loving Libertarian Pacific Coast. If you spend time in Lisbon, you have a common experience of running into people and say, where are you born? And they’ll say, well, Lisbon. And where were your parents born? Lisbon. And they still live in my neighborhood. And my grandparents live in my neighborhood, too. You never hear this in San Francisco or Portland. Everybody is from somewhere else. And many people actually moved to the West to get away from everybody else, to get away from social constraints. I want to be my own person. Well, Portugal is the opposite of that.

So there’s a lot of constraint on behavior. It’s loving constraint, but it is constraint, those boundaries around people’s behavior that don’t exist out in the West with the exception of recent immigrant communities, which, by the way, have very low rates of drug problems.

This is something that I always think people underestimate at least about San Francisco, which is one of these cities under the best, which is that it is a culture of enormous tolerance. And that is a lot of what makes San Francisco remarkable, what has made it a home for L.G.B.T.Q. people when that was a very rare thing to be, what has made it open to all these weird ideas from computer scientists and strange nerds who came around with their thoughts about AI and their thoughts about visual operating systems.

And people don’t like necessarily the dark side of this open, tolerant, nonjudgmental way of looking at the world. There’s a bit of a divided soul, a difficulty judging, a discomfort with paternalism, and a kind of optimism that if you let subcultures have their freedom and grapple their way forward, they’ll find their way to an equilibrium and that we should be very, very, very skeptical of heavy handed particularly law enforcement as a way of changing culture.

That is a very nice description of the city we both love. And we’d be much poorer without San Francisco’s embrace of individual freedom and all the great things that it gives, which you just articulated. To me, the resolution here is taking addiction seriously as a problem.

So if you look at somebody who is using methamphetamine five times a day, you could say, well, that is really an expression of their individual freedom. I need to respect that. But if you recognize the likelihood that they are not particularly free because they are addicted, the inconsistency disappears. And so I feel personally no contradiction between saying the state should intervene with pressure — for example, mandating people into treatment. For me, that doesn’t conflict with individual freedom at all. So when I talked to somebody who said, look, you need to just let people do what they want, I say, look. I volunteer in the Tenderloin. And I carry naloxone, the overdose rescue medication, with me. If someone were in front of me in overdose and dying, should I administer naloxone even though the person can’t consent, they’re unconscious?

And I’ve never had anyone say, you’re right. You should just respect their right to die. They say, well, no, of course, you should do that, conceding the principle that there are times that the thing we can do the most to help other people is take care of them when they were not in a fit state to take care of themselves.

Is that a straw man, though? I can’t really think of people at least that I have heard arguing that somebody under the throes of heroin addiction is free and is choosing the life they live, that they’re likely to be happy with the world they now exist in.

One of the really striking things about this new rhetoric about drug policy out here is how rarely addiction is even mentioned. The fact that there’s so much focus on drug overdose, which is, of course, terrible, but that is treated as the only index and not addiction reflects a viewpoint that that’s not either an important thing or not that real a thing. Because if it were, you would note that in the heyday of wild opioid prescribing, there were fewer overdoses, but there were far more people who were addicted to those substances. And that made their lives dramatically worse.

I also see the lack of attention to addiction in the investment in harm reduction without the idea of using it as a springboard into treatment, which to me is a very novel idea that’s only become more powerful in the last couple of years where people feel like that in itself is the goal versus trying to eliminate addiction and get somebody into recovery.

So this is complicated, I think, because there’s this interaction in this period between what you might call elite and mass drug culture. In this period, you have the rise of a lot of super popular podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss, who are very open about their psychedelic use. You have Michael Pollan’s great book on psychedelics, “How to Change Your Mind.” I do a bunch of podcasts about psychedelics. You have a book by Carl Hart, who’s a well-known drug researcher at Columbia, called “Drug Use for Grownups” where he talks openly about using heroin to relax at the end of the day. Ketamine use rises in a very public way.

And so you have this change in drug culture among elites. It becomes much more acceptable to talk about how you use drugs to improve your life that I think also makes it look hypocritical to have a punitive approach not just legally but culturally towards other kinds of drug use. Do you think there’s something to that?

Yeah. I’ve seen that very much, too. And people with a platform, they’ve got a hearing. One of the most important things to understand about Measure 110, for example, is it passed easily. It was not that controversial as people thought it would be. And that elite change, I think, was part of the dynamic.

And definitely, you could see that in psychedelics in Oregon, which, as you know, has set up an entire system to administer psychedelics as a healing force. At least that’s the theory. These are transformative medicines often, by the way, in advance of evidence. But put that aside for a minute. And that is a remarkable change.

I think the criticism you could make of people who are well off and well resourced and have a lot of social capital and have access to treatment and health care whenever they need it is that they could be overgeneralizing what it’s like to use drugs in that situation versus the situation most people find themselves in with a lot less resources and a lot fewer things to catch them if they develop a problem. Now, some would say, well, the real problem is the law, and it’s the punishment you get and all that. And that can absolutely ruin people’s lives. There’s no question to that.

But there’s also quite a few people whose lives are ruined by drugs, including cannabis. There’s some people whose lives have been ruined by psychedelics and certainly people’s lives ruined by cocaine and fentanyl and so on. You don’t think about that much maybe when you are in a really comfy, well-resourced environment. But the average person who lives in a more typical environment does think about it, does have to worry about it. And that gives them a different understanding of what drugs are, how risky they are, and what they want their government to do about them.

That all makes sense to me. But something else I would say was here was that I would have described the consensus for a very long time as drug use is bad, and policing is good. And to some degree, by the time of 110 and some other reforms we were seeing in other states, I think that there was — and you can tell me if this tracks for you — a belief that drug use is somewhere between neutral and good depending on the drug, and policing is bad.

Yeah. There’s no way to separate what happened in Oregon from the murder of George Floyd and from Black Lives Matter. I mean, the protests against police were as intense in Oregon as anywhere they were in the United States and indeed throughout the region and a lot of concern — and it’s got to be said — a lot of justifiable concern about racism and policing. And a huge portion of that was focused on drug enforcement. And that flip was clearly part of why the bill passed.

In terms of drug use, I think there’s a split. I mean, so there are people who accept it’s a health matter. So let’s move to that part of the population, some of whom will say, it’s not a good idea, but we should add health services, and I certainly wouldn’t punish anybody for it, to people would say, no, it is good. In fact, it is actively good. Drug use is good. Drug use should be accepted and maybe even promoted or celebrated. And the debate has been, I think, between those two strands, whereas in the ‘80s, it was more between “drugs are bad — period” and “they should be legal even if they’re good or bad.”

You’ve written about billboards that I used to see and always thought were somewhat strange around fentanyl use and showing happy people — and these were in San Francisco — showing happy people and suggesting if you’re going to use this stuff, use it with friends. Use it around others. Make sure you’re not doing it alone.

One way of looking at them was as a destigmatization of this. It’s totally fine. Just be safe. And another way of looking at it was a total last gasp, but we don’t know what to do. We’re going to try this approach to everything else is failing. Maybe if we completely turn around our approach and just try to change the social dynamics in which people use, that might have an effect on the margin.

So several things there you’re saying, I think they’re important. One is, absolutely. In the face of all this death and all this suffering, we’re all desperate for solutions. And I think it is good that we are thinking in very fundamental ways about what the solutions are. That should be the case when you have this much suffering.

I think it is not irrelevant that these changes have unfolded during a pandemic where, let’s face it, we all went a little crazy. It was very stressful. It was emotional. Many policy debates took on a very personal cast. And we did rock between different extremes in our politics.

With the billboards — and just to describe these billboards, what to me is interesting about them is that the public health department signed off on these. And if they had been promoting beer, they would’ve been outraged by them because they would’ve said, well, you’re making it look like this is something young, attractive, successful people do. And it’s a lot of fun. And you’re understanding all the risk. And you’re going to be tempting kids. You’re basically giving people really bad information. But it wasn’t alcohol. It was fentanyl.

And so I guess they felt it was reasonable on the idea that this will destigmatize. And then people will be comfortable talking about it and using fentanyl together. And they would show people in the apartment having a nice party. Then they could take care of each other in the event of an overdose. It would be a social event, and then you could be there. To me, it’s an extraordinary chain of reasoning. But that’s where San Francisco got in 2021.

I lived in San Francisco during this period. It also had a highly liberalizing attitude on drugs. It had significant open air drug markets, particularly in the Tenderloin.

But what I always saw as the core thing that was infuriating people because I lived in places like D.C. that had a much higher murder rate but where crime was much less of an angry political issue was a feeling that the government was tolerating disorder, that it wasn’t fighting it and failing or fighting it and failing to triumph over what’s a very hard problem, but that the government was allowing it, that they were allowing these open air drug markets, that they were allowing people to shoot up on the street, and that it turned out the politics of permitting disorder were really, really, really bad.

Yes, they are. And I volunteer in the Tenderloin. So I’ve spent a lot of time in those neighborhoods and definitely pick up that sense. And, say, for a number of people would express it in an even harsher way, which is the government is tolerating it where I live in a way they would never tolerate it in a wealthier neighborhood. That could be coupled also with a sense of some of those people in the wealthier neighborhoods say this should be tolerated, but they’re not having to tolerate it. I am. And that generates understandable anger.

And this has had an interesting racial dimension in my observation of it is that a lot of this tolerance has been pushed in the name of racial justice often by white college educated progressives but is unpopular with many, many people of color who live in low income neighborhoods because they’re paying the cost of it while it’s being advocated for for people who they don’t even know who live in neighborhoods that don’t have these kinds of problems.

I was reading recently a lawsuit filed by residents of the Tenderloin against San Francisco. And it was saying in a way that is illegal and unconstitutional, it was alleging that San Francisco — and everybody knows this to be true — was not enforcing laws in the Tenderloin the way it was in other parts of the city, that it had settled on a containment strategy in the Tenderloin. And the Tenderloin is really rough for people who have not walked around there. I mean, the disorder, the despair, the difficulty’s incredibly visible. And one of the things that was noted in the lawsuit was that the Tenderloin has a much higher ratio of children than most parts of San Francisco. It has a lot of immigrant families, a lot of poor families. And so this is being tolerated where really a lot of kids were.

And the argument was that this was not allowed where richer people lived in San Francisco, and it was where these poorer people lived. And even knowing that, it was striking to see it laid out and to see these experiences of people who were living amidst it laid out and their fury that containment was being done on their backs.

Why are there hundreds of dealers standing on street corners in the Tenderloin and in the south of Market? They are not there to service the neighborhood. Because if you live in a neighborhood and your dealer lives in the neighborhood, your dealer doesn’t have to stand on a corner. You know each other. You can text. You can just stop by and make your transactions.

Open air markets are there to service strangers. They’re so that buyers and sellers can find each other really fast. And in an open air market, it’s serving people who don’t live in the neighborhood. There’s no reason there’d be that many dealers. The Tenderloin doesn’t need that many dealers to pay for its own drug use.

So it’s a legitimate gripe if you live in a neighborhood and you’re trying to raise a family in a neighborhood that is taken over by an open air market to say, we’re taking all the harms of all the drug use of the other neighborhoods where they don’t allow open air dealing. But people know they can just drive from there to here pick up their drugs and then go off about their way. And that’s unfair. And so I sympathize with the residents of the Tenderloin who are raising that very legitimate gripe about not getting equal protection under the law.

One question I’ve had about all this is how much of it is a set of policies that might’ve worked or certainly worked better than they did, but fentanyl rolled a grenade underneath this? I mean, a lot of this thinking was happening years before fentanyl just completely invaded America.

The emergence and dominance of powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl among the opioids or super strong methamphetamine that is now a larger share of the market than cocaine has, I think, undermined basic assumptions about drug policy across the world. When a kind of person who might come into, say, a methadone clinic addicted to heroin, their heroin use might be once a day or maybe twice a day, including people who were holding jobs, people who still were in touch with their families. Not that life was going well, but there was some level of manageability. We now have people with fentanyl using 10, 20, 30 times a day. Their entire existence is — because fentanyl has a very short cycle of action.

So you wake up. You’re in withdrawal. Withdrawal is incredibly unpleasant. You may smoke fentanyl, smoke, smoke, smoke. Maybe it takes 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Your withdrawal finally stops. You smoke some more till you get high. You fall asleep. You wake up, and you’re in withdrawal. And you’re just really stuck like that.

And I see people like that. I mean, I’m very optimistic about the potential of recovery for addiction. Those are what I’ve seen. And those are also my values. I try to approach everybody that way.

And I also sometimes am frightened that it’s just much, much harder to help people in this state when their life is that consumed by drugs even relative to how consumed their lives were by drugs like heroin and OxyContin. It’s really pretty frightening. And we are getting it first. The United States and Canada too are being exposed to these drugs.

It’s interesting to note in Europe, they’re just starting to get these drugs. And whether they’ll keep with their same policy mix is a really interesting question. It isn’t entirely sure. I have a colleague who says fentanyl is like an antibiotic resistant infection. The stuff we always done that used to work doesn’t work anymore. And that’s terrifying.

How good now is our best gold standard addiction treatment?

So this varies a lot by drug. I’m going to start with the bad news first, which is the stimulants. So the biggest disappointment of my career is about cocaine and methamphetamine. I started my career in the late 1980s. And the care that people got for those drugs then is almost the same as what they get now. There’s been very little progress.

Billions have been spent. Brilliant people have tried to develop, for example, pharmacological treatments for them. Nothing has panned out yet. Most of the behavioral treatments don’t work. We have one thing that seems to work, which is contingency management, a particular way of structuring and giving rewards to help people make changes in their behavior. But we’ve had that for a very long time. So the news there is kind of disappointing.

For alcohol, funnily enough, one of the best things we have has been around forever, which is Alcoholics Anonymous. And for a long time, people in my field looked down on it as too folky and not medical enough. And yet there’s now tremendous evidence that myself and some colleagues assembled in what’s called a Cochrane Collaboration showing that does work, that people do, in fact, as well or better in Alcoholics Anonymous as they do coming to see people like myself.

There’s also some medications available. Acamprosate is one. Naltrexone is another. Some people benefit from those.

On the opioids, we have multiple approved FDA medications. Methadone has been around a very long time. It’s a substitute medication. It is effective for many people. Buprenorphine is another substitute medication, slightly different pharmacologically, but also effective for a great many people. And we have naltrexone, which is it works differently. It’s a blocking agent. And there are people who do very well on that.

So those things are all good. That’s considered the front line. You offer people medication first. And people also can benefit from other kinds of things — therapies and from residential care. And if somebody is out on the street with an addiction, it’s not believable that they are going to check in once a week for an hour with a therapist because their lives aren’t that organized. They usually need a safe substance free environment in which to stay. And those are often in short supply. So we sometimes don’t have success there not because we don’t know what to do, but because we haven’t allocated the resources to do it.

But how good are any of these? I mean, let’s zoom in on alcohol for a minute. I’ve known a lot of people — people I’ve loved — who have had very severe alcohol addictions. And you can’t be near that and not realize how differently different drugs act on different people. If I am drinking, just at some point, my body is like, that’s good. We’re done.

And there are people I know who they have burnt their life down around them. And they’ve been in and out of residential treatment. They’ve gone to A.A. Some people recover. Often they really don’t. How likely is it if you go into A.A. or some of these other things that you’ll recover?

People who seek for alcohol treatment or Alcoholics Anonymous can fall into three bins. If you look at them about 6 or 12 months later, somewhere between 40 percent, 50 percent are dramatically better off. Their lives are dramatically better. And that could be the completely abstinent, or they’re much more abstinent, but their lives are dramatically better.

Then there’s another group of people who seem to be somewhat better. That might be 20 percent, 25 percent. They’re still having significant problems. But maybe they make some things like, at least I’m not drinking and driving at the same time, or at least my spouse and I are making some progress in our marital communication. And then the remaining people unfortunately look exactly the same as the day they came into treatment. They either made no progress, or they made some slight progress and then relapsed.

The perception that we have of it tends to be driven by that last group. That’s because when people get better, they disappear into the woodwork. So when I worked in the White House, I used to think when I walked by somebody getting out of the metro who’s actively using drugs or alcohol, I’m very aware. That’s so visible to me.

And yet I know every day people walk by me in suits or in recovery, and I don’t notice them at all. Just looks like another Washington lawyer or civil servant or politician. So the cognitive effects of people who are doing the worst or the most vivid give us, I think, a more despairing view than we ought to have.

How much is the risk of developing an addiction genetic?

Genes affect us a lot. Studies across addictions show a genetic contribution. It varies by the substance, but at least 30 percent, sometimes even 50 percent. How much control people have just in general — some people are more impulsive than others, have a harder time thinking about the future than others from their first day on this Earth. And that will increase your risk for addiction.

If you’re very, very risk averse person who thinks a lot about the future, drug use looks differently to you than if you’re someone who wants to feel good today and is a happy go lucky person. Some of why we get addicted has to do with things that nobody can really control. And those can be things like liking. Even for the first time we use them, we like drugs differently.

When my boys were little, they were in the backyard, and they were climbing a tree. And I said, ah, that’s not how to climb a tree. I’ll show you how to climb a tree. So when I got to the emergency room, I said, this bone is broken. And I know it because I can see the way it’s knocked off my wrist.

And they nicely patched it for me. And they sent me home with Vicodin, the opioid Vicodin, bottle of 30, and said, it’s going to hurt. So you’re going to want to take these.

I take one. And I feel terrible. Stomach all feels bound up. I feel just really groggy. I don’t like this. For me, it was very easy to say pain is better than taking even one more of these pills. Meanwhile, I’ve treated people who say, the first time I had an opioid, it was like a hole that had been in my heart my whole life filled up for the first time.

Now, both those experiences are real. You cannot attribute them to, well, Keith must be a real solid and moral person, and that’s an immoral person, or Keith must have made good choices, and that person made bad choices, because we had no learning history at all. It was just the kismet of genetics that drugs feel differently to different people from the very first time, not just learning history.

And so I find it very easy to be sympathetic to someone who’s addicted to opioids because I think the reason I’m not going to do that is not because I’m a better person. It’s because they just don’t feel good to me. And to you, they felt fantastic. And so you were willing to keep on using them.

It’s not just that I find it easy to be sympathetic. But I find it hard to know how to think about it because, to be blunt, I’ve had very positive personal experiences with certain drugs. And at the same time, I’m somebody who is extremely nonaddictive in this area of my life. I have never wanted more puffs on a cigarette than I had. I’ve never smoked a cigarette and been like, I need another one. Obviously, other people I knew when I was in college, that was not how that went for them.

There is something here where, on the one hand, I worry that a fair amount of the discourse around drugs comes from people for whom maybe it actually is positive for them. There are people who have real positive relationships with different kinds of substances both legal and illegal. Adderall can be amazing for somebody with A.D.H.D., and it can be very destructive for somebody who ends up using it recreationally. I mean, you were talking about methamphetamines. And it’s not all that different.

And it becomes, I think, almost philosophically hard to know how to think about these substances that really can range. How to think about something where for some people it can be a very good part of their life, either pleasurable or even very profound. For other people, it can be a complete disaster that will actually ruin their life. And who are you making policy for and how feels like something that this conversation gets caught on a lot.

I agree, yeah, because drugs aren’t good, and drugs aren’t bad. They are good and bad. And sometimes I envy colleagues who work in areas like cholera prevention. If there’s a cholera outbreak, and you get rid of it, you’re a hero. Everybody loves you. Nobody says, but I was having a party. I need a little cholera. Can’t you keep a little cholera for special occasions? It’s like, no, everyone just hates cholera. Drugs are absolutely not like that. People have great experiences with drugs. I drink wine, by the way. That’s a drug. Or ethanol is a drug.

So we can’t resolve it that simply. And so we have to get into these questions of, well, when is it good? And when is it bad? And for whom is it good? And for whom is it bad?

And then there’s a question that is to me a philosophical question, in fact, religions grapple with, which is should I give something up for the benefit of others? Perhaps I can use fentanyl freely and enjoy it. But should I still say it shouldn’t be in recreational market because I’m aware enough of my fellow people would find it life ruining? And so the moral thing is for me to give it up so the sense that all of us can live together in a spirit of common humanity. And there’s always going to be tougher discussions, things that are good and bad versus things that are just clearly good, and we should just embrace them, and clearly bad and just reject them.

I wonder about this with the rollout of legal cannabis across a lot of the country. So this is something that I occasionally take. I’ll sometimes have a 5 milligram edible to help me sleep or to relax at the end of the night. It isn’t something I want all that often. And when I go into these stores, and I look in them, and I see the way they’re popping up in New York the way they popped up in California, it’s pretty clear this market is not catering to me.

And I think a lot about something that, as you mentioned, our mutual late friend Mark Kleiman, who was one of the great drug researchers and crime researchers, used to say to me, which is that alcohol companies do not make their money on people who drink a beer or two a week. They make their money on people who drink a case. And when I go into these stores, what I see are the rise of super high potency products that I wouldn’t touch. And clearly the money is being made given how many of the stores there are on people taking a lot more than I am a lot more often. When you look at what is going on with legal cannabis, how do you feel about it?

So start at the question of should we ever throw people in a cell for cannabis? Oh, so that was a terrible idea. So let’s take that off the table and just say if we’re going to have a legal industry, have we regulated it well? And I think it’s absolutely clear we have not.

And this is something we’re generally I’d say bad at relative to other countries of constraining profit when the profit damages public health. And so we have an industry with hardly any constraints on their products, not a very good record with even labeling their products accurately, very poor enforcement of even keeping the legal regime in place. And the pot shops in New York are a good example of that. A huge number of them are unlicensed and just doing whatever they want. And they’re being allowed to do that.

So I think we’ve done a really bad job with cannabis and in part driven by this phenomenon of not being willing to admit that cannabis isn’t good or bad, but it is both. And so when Mark Kleiman and I worked with Washington state, who was one of the first states to legalize, and we said, you still need to have some enforcement to make a licensing system work, I remember people literally either laughing or getting angry at us saying, the war on drugs is over. No more enforcement ever.

It’s like, actually, no. Why would you have a license and do the right thing and not hire minors? And why would you be sure to card? And why would you sell clean and safe products when you do that because you get a market advantage in a licensed market? And so if we just allow anybody to do anything, well, then there’s really no point in getting licensed, no point in paying your taxes, no point in being a good citizen, no point in not in hawking dangerous products.

And that’s the situation that we have. And we’re going to be really sorry for it. The distribution of consumption is also really important to think about. It’s not quite half, but it’s certainly a plurality of cannabis users today are using it every single day, usually a high strength product.

Wow, really? Almost half?

Yeah. I’d say about 40 percent are daily or near daily users. And so that’s where the money is if you’re running an industry. And so you want to produce cheap high-strength product that that population will use and use and use and use. And I just think we’re really going to regret that.

My friends over at “Search Engine,” which is a great podcast, just did this two part series on the New York cannabis market. And I had not really understood that while New York is now completely full of what appeared to me to be legal cannabis stores, virtually none of them are legal cannabis stores. There’s a very small number of legal ones and then a huge number of illegal ones.

And you might say, well, how are there all these illegal stores? And the answer is that nobody wants to send the police to bust people for cannabis. And so much of the theory of legalization as I understood it for years was that we will legalize and then be able to regulate the market. But if what we’ve done is legalized, but we’re not willing to use law enforcement, and so we cannot regulate the market, that’s actually a dramatically different policy equilibrium than I feel like I was promised.

Yeah, the experience you’re having — I think people have had across a lot of drug policy — is expecting one thing and then getting another and underestimating the ideological commitments of the people who designed it. So there are people who say, we’re going to have this legal market, and we’ll get rid of the illegal sellers and all that. But that isn’t what necessarily they wanted. They just thought, look, this should not be restricted at all. And you should just be able to deal with it and sell it and have a classic Libertarian understanding of it as opposed to a more progressive understanding of what we expect from industries. And this problem is replicated all over the country.

There’s also something that’s happened in policing, which is there’s always more to do for police than they have to do. So they’re not super interested in getting involved. Even with some of the massive problems we have, for example, here in California, we have huge illicit groves, some of them staffed by people who have literally been human trafficked. But it hasn’t really risen up as an enforcement priority because, cannabis, we don’t do that anymore.

You said this about cannabis, and I found it really striking. Quote, “The newly legal industry looks a lot like the tobacco industry — an under-regulated, under-taxed, politically connected, white dominated corporate entity that generates its profits mainly by addicting lower income people to a drug. 85 percent of Colorado’s cannabis, for example, is consumed by people who did not graduate from college.” Can you say a bit more about that socioeconomic breakdown?

Yeah. So I think that in middle upper class society, that figure’s really shocking. And the idea is, oh, cannabis user is, oh, someone like you, someone who has a good job, went to college, and maybe uses occasionally. No. I say if you want to think of the typical user, think of somebody who works in a gas station who gets high on all their breaks. That’s much more the sociodemographic breakdown of it.

And by the way, that’s what you see with tobacco as well. In my professional middle class life, it is so rare for me to see somebody smoking a cigarette. But if you go into a poor neighborhood, there’s still a lot of people who smoke cigarettes.

And so we’ve won the war on smoking I guess, middle class and well off. But it’s far less the case as you move into people who have much more challenging lives. And this comes back to the point that you raised and I think is really important one is that since that professional class makes the policies, it’s really important for them to remember that their lives are different than the people whose lives will be most profoundly affected by those policies.

One thing that a lot of drugs, cannabis being one of them, do is allow you to escape from a life that doesn’t feel good to you. If I had a job that bored the hell out of me, it might be more appealing to use something like cannabis more often. I really like my job. And I definitely cannot do it high, so I don’t. But there’s both a question of how does this affect you as a person but also how much might you want it, need it, need the escape?

I think this gets down to one of the most important questions to ask, which is, why don’t more people use drugs? People say, why does anybody use drugs? And it’s like, well, do you ask me why anybody has sex? That’s a really strange question. It feels good. We don’t need an explanation why people use them.

It’s actually far more interesting to think, why aren’t we all using them? Why aren’t you and I using drugs right now? And big reasons why are, well, we have other rewards in our lives. And we have a lot of other stuff that we want to do that is rewarding.

So in the absence of those things, the why not question, the answer seems to be, well, I can’t think of a reason why not. I might as well. Well, you won’t live as long. Well, I don’t expect to live that long. You won’t do well in your brilliant career. I don’t have a brilliant career. You won’t enjoy your fabulous house. I don’t have a fabulous house.

And that’s a reason I think it’s easy or it should be easy to have some sympathy. We all don’t have the same set of rewards to choose from. Rewards any neuroscientists would tell you are judged relative to each other. We don’t just make judgments over good, bad, but we do a lot of this is better than that. So as you pull rewards out of an environment, yeah, drugs become relatively more appealing.

It feels to me across this conversation that we’re talking about two eras that didn’t really work. I think a lot of people are worried about just a pendulum swinging between extremes. I’m curious if to you there is a synthesis out there either in a place or in a theory that feels like it balances these different realities, that people will use drugs? They are good for some people and terrible for others, that we don’t want to be throwing adults constantly into jail because they did something with their own bodies. We don’t want tons of people to get addicted because we decided not to throw anybody in jail. Is there something that feels to you like it strikes a balance here?

So years ago, when I worked for President Obama, we cited Washington’s example because they had taken a couple of hundred million dollars, spent it on mental health and substance use treatment, and showed within 12 months they’d actually made all their money back because of less crime, because of less disability, because of less trips to the emergency room. And importantly, they had gathered data to show that. And that was one of the things we used when the Affordable Care Act was being done to explain why covering substance use in that package would be a good deal for the taxpayer in addition to, of course, being a good deal to any person who had that problem.

There’s also certain issues where people with very different views and feelings about drugs can agree. So I’ve been working with a lot of people around the country on building Medicaid into the correctional system starting in California. It was pushed by a fabulous assembly member named Marie Waldron. We turn Medicaid on before people leave. And that gets them typically on some type of medication. And that can pull people together because it makes it far less likely for them to die of an overdose or to have other health problems. And it also makes them much less likely to commit crimes. And so you can get people like, well, I’m not very sympathetic. I don’t want to spend money on the health of some drug user. But if it makes them less likely to commit more crime, I like that. And other people say, well, this is a health matter. It’s like, well, then they like it too.

And that approach, which now multiple states have been approved for and the Biden administration C.M.S. has said, you can all have this Medicaid waiver — I don’t know the current number. I think it’s about 14 or 15 other states are applying. And as an example of something where you don’t necessarily have to resolve all the disagreements, but you can find a policy that maximizes multiple outcomes that a broad section of people care about.

Something I’ve seen you talk about and write about is this idea that the way that policing should work here is it should be very, very predictable, very certain you will get picked up, and very modest. It’s sort of almost like it operates as a constant annoyance. You end up in jail for 24 hours and are let loose. And there was some evidence that definitely did decrease repeat offending not among everybody but among enough people to really matter in the study. Do you still think that’s a good idea?

Absolutely. It’s a good principle for enforcement and for deterrence to have it be predictable, responsive, and fair. There’s been a lot of success with drink driving and alcohol through the program 24/7 Sobriety, which started in South Dakota and has now spread to about 15, 20 states and is also now in other countries.

It’s all across England, all across Wales where I was just last week actually working on that, which is a model whereby people are sentenced after their second, third, fourth, fifth alcohol related arrest to not be allowed to drink. They aren’t sent to jail. They aren’t fine. Their cars aren’t taken away. But their alcohol use is monitored literally every single day with swift and certain but modest consequences if they drink.

And that program has reduced incarceration. It has reduced crime. It has reduced domestic violence. And it strikes a good balance between using the criminal justice system to protect and put some constraints on people but not in a way that ends up being carceral.

And the place where we can really make a huge impact on that in the United States is the million people we’re already supervising on probation and parole who have substance use problems. And we need to roll those out more broadly. For example, Oregon’s new policy mix if implemented properly, which will be a challenge, I think it would be a very good one. They do put pressure on people to seek treatment. But they say literally, no one is going to be put into a prison in Oregon simply because they used a drug. And now they’re building up the other part you got to have, which is have to have the health system and the services that keep people alive while they use and then help them get into recovery. That, I think, is a very appealing mix of things.

We have a really hard time, I think, in the U.S. and lots of policy issues of realizing that it’s not a series of on/off switches. It’s a series of dials. And you can adjust things and find sensible, nuanced approaches that are more effective than what fits on a bumper sticker.

And I feel like that’s what my job is. And people like me who do not have to take the great risk to stand up and people and say, please vote for me. And then that means I have to explain something simply. It can’t be any other way but are next to it and are very fortunate to have the time to sift through evidence in a calm environment before they venture out with some suggestions about what we might do better.

I think that’s a good place to end. So then as a final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

So there’s so many good books written about in this area. It’s hard to pick. So I decided to prioritize personal relationship starting with your late friend of mine Mark Kleiman, who wrote a book called “Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know,” coauthored with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken.

And it is exactly what the title promises. It’s accessible. It’s something you can dip into and out of and answer any question you want. And I also point to it as just a model of how academics in any area can write in such a fashion that a broad audience can engage their work and learn from it.

The second book I would suggest, again, from a friend who’s someone I’ve known since she was a psychiatric resident and I was an assistant professor. And that’s Dr. Anna Lembke here at Stanford. And the book is called “Dopamine Nation,” which was a deserved bestseller around the world.

But that gives you much more of the human experience describing, what is it like to be addicted, to not be able to stop doing something even though you know it’s destructive? How does it feel? How do you try to overcome it? And what is going on in that person neurologically that makes it so hard? And then the book also talks about just the seeking of reward in a reward saturated society and how we all are chasing all these things, whether it’s on our cell phones or with drugs and so on.

And then the last one — maybe a more eccentric choice, but it’s such a good book — is by Thomas De Quincey. And it’s called “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” So De Quincey was a hangers on of the romantic poet set about 200 years ago in England. And he wrote at the time a very scandalous account. But, of course, also scandalous things in Britain are often very popular things.

So it became a bestseller about his experience of long time opium use. And he talks about the pains of opium and the pleasures of opium and a bit about how it affects social relationships, how it affects human psychology. And what I like about is, first off, it has a wonderfully florid over the top poetic style. And the other thing is almost everything you and I have talked about today is touched on in that book. And that shows that while we do learn things and we go forward with science, with policy, it is also true that the human relationship with drugs has had the same benefits and challenges in it for time immemorial. And so that’s a reminder of that when you read a book written that long ago and can resonate with so much of what’s going on today.

Keith Humphreys, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

Drug policy feels very unsettled right now. The war on drugs was a failure. But so far, the war on the war on drugs hasn’t entirely been a success, either.

Take Oregon. In 2020, it became the first state in the nation to decriminalize hard drugs. It was a paradigm shift — treating drug-users as patients rather than criminals — and advocates hoped it would be a model for the nation. But then there was a surge in overdoses and public backlash over open-air drug use. And last month, Oregon’s governor signed a law restoring criminal penalties for drug possession, ending that short-lived experiment.

Other states and cities have also tipped toward backlash. And there are a lot of concerns about how cannabis legalization and commercialization is working out around the country. So what did the supporters of these measures fail to foresee? And where do we go from here?

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Keith Humphreys is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who specializes in addiction and its treatment. He also served as a senior policy adviser in the Obama administration. I asked him to walk me through why Oregon’s policy didn’t work out; what policymakers sometimes misunderstand about addiction; the gap between “elite” drug cultures and how drugs are actually consumed by most people; and what better drug policies might look like.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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An essay on drug addiction with outline and quotations

 2nd year. FSc part 2, ICS part 2, FA part 2 and BA students can see this excellent essay on Drug Addiction and learn it for their exams. The essay is given with outlines and quotations. You can save this essay as a pdf file if you want. 

The essay covers 300 - 400 words and you can skip some sentences if you want to keep it to 200 words limit.

Drug Addiction Essay with outlines and quotations

The essay has been written for the help of the students of grade 10 to grade 12. Anyhow this essay can be used for any exam as it is an excellent essay. You can see a list of related essays topics here.

An essay on abuses and effects of drug addiction

1. Introduction and definitions

2. Kinds of Drugs

3. Drug Addiction in Pakistan

4. Causes and factors behind drug addiction

5. Personal and social effects of Drug addiction

6. Prevention of drug abuses

7. Conclusion

Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you–it’s the cage you live in - Johann Hari

We don’t choose to be addicted; what we choose to do is deny our pain - Anonymous

There’s not a drug on earth that can make life meaningful - Anonymous

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town - Anne Lamott

Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope -  Fredrik Backman

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Windsor addiction treatment centre has lost 19 beds in recent months. Here's why

The beds are funded through donations, according to the organization.

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Amid an ongoing drug crisis that continues to kill an increasing number of people in Windsor-Essex, one of the area's well-known residential recovery centres has had to close 19 beds in recent months because of the expense.

Growing calls for help, mixed with a toxic drug supply and complex client needs have already been straining the services at Brentwood Recovery Home. And in recent months, the facility's executive director says on top of that, they've had to cut the number of beds available due to inflation.

That means they'll be accepting fewer people in need of help — at least for now.

"[There's] lots of demand, and demand's outstripping funding and so difficult decisions had to be made by the board," said Elizabeth Dulmage. 

And what this also means, says Dulmage with a heavy sigh, is that "wait times will increase." 

Right now, she says that Brentwood has a six-to-eight week wait list with more than 200 people hoping to get in. 

• Amid rise in cannabis-induced psychosis, mental health program in Windsor gets young people early help
• SafePoint pause putting lives at risk, advocates say

According to Dulmage, the beds that were lost are ones that the organization has paid for through fundraising efforts. She says it's not that donations are down, but that the growing cost of food and utilities is making it hard to keep more beds open.

Last May, Brentwood had 68 beds, but it's now operating 49 — 43 of which are provincially funded. 

And this loss of beds isn't the only hit to Windsor-Essex resources dedicated to supporting those with addiction issues. At the start of this year, the region's first drug consumption and treatment site was forced to close due to a lack of provincial funding and its status still remains in limbo. Some advocates say these setbacks shouldn't be happening and have them concerned for those who are struggling. 

'One step forward, two steps back' 

Former Brentwood client Joshua Burg — who completed a 90-day program last year for substance abuse issues — says it's "unfortunate" that there will be fewer beds. 

"They would benefit from opening up more beds," he said, adding that having a place to stay and food made for him helped him get through the program. 

"Stay strong out there, everyone whose struggling." 

Executive director of harm reduction organization Pozitive Pathways, Michael Brennan, told CBC News that "capacity, policy, stigma, bureaucracy and funding" often get in the way of the work that's being done. 

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"It feels like one step forward, two steps back for our community and that can be frustrating," he said. 

He added that it's also frustrating for people with substance abuse issues and their families, who might feel like the resources just aren't there when they start asking for help. 

"I think the real loss here, again, is for all those individuals who we feel that continue to slip through the cracks," he said, adding that he knows the local sector is doing its best to support people. 

More complex needs 

Brentwood's Dulmage adds that the organization is also spending more on staffing. She says they've had to hire more nurses as the people coming in for treatment have more complex needs.

"We're not just treating the addiction, we're also treating and trying to address their housing situation, the underemployment situation, complexities in their health care that we just didn't see 30 years ago, so it's a more complex environment than what we had," she said, adding that mental health issues and multiple substance use are also factors. 

The 19 beds aren't permanently closed, but it's not clear when Brentwood will be able to reopen them. 

"Knowing that there are literally young people out there dying from their addiction ... it takes a toll," said Dulmage of how this is impacting her and her staff. 

But Dulmage says the organization remains hopeful that the spots will be available again soon. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Videojournalist

Jennifer La Grassa is a videojournalist at CBC Windsor. She is particularly interested in reporting on healthcare stories. Have a news tip? Email [email protected]

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