The Addiction Help .com

Any kind of addiction - alcohol, drugs, sex, food, smoking - what are the best ones?

From living in a home with drug addicted parents I know what real drug addicts look like and how they behave. The most REALISTIC depictions of drug use are

The Basketball Diaries
Ray
Less Than Zero
Leaving Las Vegas
Gia
When a Man Loves a Woman is sanitized but its still a good movie. I think thats more about the struggle of the loved ones of addicts than about the addiction itself.

If you really want to see some serious real life drug addicts, there is a documentary from HBO called "Dope Sick Love" That is about as real as it gets.

2006-12-15 08:16:01 by michael c

smile on every face on the planet. ... alcohol Addiction quot;quit drinkingquot; Health quot;how to quit drinkingquot; quot;social drinking ...

The grammar and spelling may be terrible (i apologize).
I have been thinking about this for some time now. I am now 27 and over the last 7 years have experienced way too much drug and alcohol incidents. I'm trying real hard to hit the key points of why I think the last 7 years of my life would interest anyone enough to read. From grade school until I graduated high school, I remained the most straight edge kid you ever met. I Even graduated high school being on National Honor's society and was near the top of the class. I was an athlete and came from a middle class family, but the whole time I was dealing with an alcoholic father on the weekends. He was a good father most of the time, but did not handle drinking so well. For that reason, I did not have a drink until I was almost 21, but did start doing drugs at age 20. I have been arrested 7 times for alcohol related incidents and yet I have held down a very respected professional job for three years now after graduating college with a 3.2. I have friends that are millionaires and friends that have literally lived on the street. I have a daughter that was born when I was 25. I have dwelt with addiction problems since I can remember. Starting early with being addicted to being perfect in everything I did, which then turned into playing basketball, and then right before drugs, I was addicted to sex. To try and quit one addiction I just start doing another more often. Every time I quit doing drugs, I start drinking more or becoming addicted to sex again. I discovered online poker which became my worst addiction of all. To this day I am paying back over 6000 in credit cards used to play online poker during college. I am in the process of going through my 2nd DUI which may result in the losing of my job. I have dwelt with being put in a psych ward twice and have been given the diagnosis of Manic Depressant (Bi Polar) and having generalized anxiety since I was 18. I fight off abusing drugs for months at a time only to end up going back or becoming a worst alcoholic again.
I am looking for a way to make everything bad and dumb I have done be helpful and meaningful some way.I think that maybe If I wrote a book telling my life story so far, that it might be able to help some people. I have experienced a lot of life in a few short years that people who are lucky only have to watch in movies. Also, because of my profession, it is ridiculous that I am the person that I am. I know its wrong and I feel bad, yet I still do dumb things. I was the youngest person to ever be voted "employee of the month " at my job. Yet, I've had to deal with all the guilt of the bad things I keep doing. My book would focus on having three goals: to entertain, to educate,and to help: either those people about the make the same mistakes I did, or to help their families to understand the mind set of someone with an addictive personality.

The book would include sex, drugs, over coming them, and how to deal with them, . I am not sure if there are many books out there like this. I know a lot of people have lived WAY worst lives, but most of the ones that I know, never finished college, are behind bars, are have passed away.

I have managed to get a good job, do it well, yet I still deal with the addiction issues and am still figuring out how to stop.

Thanks for your time and I am fine with criticisms, but the real question I am asking is if you think this is a book worth writing to be read. I am also going to be pursuing a career as a speaker to younger children and teens about my life and ideas to stay clean.

From what you say I think your book would help many people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. Follow your dreams and write the book. I wish you lots of luck.

2009-05-31 23:13:43 by A

Price: $24.98

I don't want to start anything, but i have heard this, and i've been wondering if it is true. I hope i don't make anyone mad, i have no intentions to at all. My friend is Native American, and he has an addiction to alcohol, and he has been doing it forever, and i want to figure out if it is a lot worse for them than others. I don't know why it would be, but i've heard several different things. I haven't met many NA's that drink, but i've seen movies, and it is sad to see, but there is many people that do it, not just NA. If anyone could help me understand this, and help me clear it up, i'd appreciate it. Thanks!

It's true that there are alcoholics of every race. However, it seems like in general, Native Americans are more subsceptible to alcoholism.

Those of us with European ancestry have a relatively high tolerance for alcohol. Our ancestors have been drinking it for thousands of years. That's not necessarily a bad thing. In cities and towns with water contaminated with disease, beer was a cheap and safe alternative. Weak beer was the drink of choice for thousands of years, and only in the last few hundred years have hard alcohols been available, and wines affordable.

Native Americans did not have alcohol until the last couple hundred years. Unfortunately, they may have genes that make them more likely to become alcoholic. This isn't to say that all Native Americans are alcoholics, but this is a problem for some of them.

The reverse is true for Asians. Many Asians have a gene for "alcoholic flush," which makes them flush and feel sick after a small amount of alcohol. Because of their genes, they generally can't drink enough alcohol to get drunk, and alcoholism rates for Asians are very low (except for Japan, where they don't seem to have as much flush).

2008-12-11 16:26:26 by Rach

What would you say the Flashbacks symbolize?
Do you think the alcohol addiction was inherited from her mother?
Where in the movie do you think Gwen is really starting to recover from her addiction?

i think that since during the times of the flashbacks she was going through withdrawl that it was just bringing back bad memories from her childhood
theres a good chance that she inherited it from her mother because that happens alot
and i think she really started to recover when her room mate andrea killed herself.

2008-04-20 09:18:34 by nevertoolate.hedley

I have been binge drinking for 20 years now.After the binge I will swear to the moon and stars that it was the last time and in that moment of being desperately hung over I mean it most sincerely but within a week or sometimes a little longer I find myself repeating the process all over again just like the movie,’Groundhog Day’.
Now,I have been aware for a long time now that the general population’s definition of an alcoholic is out dated and misunderstood.Part of the main reason why there is so much denial associated with boozing is because the general definition is that of the chronic case of an alcoholic(the extreme case).Nobody is going to admit that they are as bad as a homeless person sitting in the street, or park with urine stained clothes drinking Special Brew, or similar,having to rely on alcohol so much that they shake without it or worse.I have never had the shakes but I am alcoholic all the same.The point I am trying to convey is that the vast population don’t know what an alcoholic actually is and I personally accept that if the truth about alcoholism was widely realised then a lot of lives would and could be saved.
Furthermore, over the 20 years that I have put my ownself through a living hell, I have also come to realise that a nicotine addiction has an absolutely enormous part in problem drinking.This may not be true in every case but there are all types of drinkers literally.In my case this is true.When someone becomes addicted to nicotine it changes their brain chemistry and creates what I call an ‘addiction centre’, this is a lot more visible or easier to understand if one thinks of how when they do drink they smoke like crazy and when they have a cigarette they then suddenly want another drink and the two work as an antidote to each other.If one smoked 20 cigarettes one after the other sober they would probably not be able to do it.Once this addiction centre is established, it is my belief that it becomes activated by certain toxins,as in alcohol and that constant craving for another cigarette that all smokers will be aware of gets activated in to drinking as well.
I am still working on my own binge drinking and admittedly I have not released myself from its claws or curse yet but I believe this is not because I am abberrated,mad,sick with a disease,genetic disorder or just outright pathetic and weak……..I believe it is because I have failed to give up nicotine long enough to either reverse or alter my brain chemistry long enough to be able to completely remove the insatiable thirst I experience when I do start drinking.In other words, I am totally convinced that if I had never become addicted to smoking I would not have been a problem drinker,smoking took away my own control and replaced it with a constant craving that starts up when I drink.
If anybody reading this needs some evidence of this then why do you think that when people stop smoking for 2 weeks or so and then go out on the town, it is well documented that they hit the booze twice as hard as normal.

nope just poor self control. that could be the result of no self discipline or a predisposition to alcohol addiction.

2008-05-09 15:18:12 by miles w