Alright, tuck this in your panties
From
Addiction—Choice or Disease
By: Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., Senior Fellow, Drug Policy Alliance
Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D.’s, view that addicts choose to use seems glib in the face of those addicts like David (son of Robert) Kennedy and Terry (daughter of George) McGovern who were children of privilege who killed themselves with chronic drug/alcohol use. These are extreme cases where the substance seemingly takes over the individual’s ability to choose.
However, I believe it is wrong to generalize their fates to all drug and alcohol misusers, including even quite compulsive users, for whom internal and environmental cues and options continue to play critical roles. John H. Halpern, M.D. appears to make the opposite error, seriously understating the variety of outcomes in addiction and the degree of choice exercised in bringing about these outcomes.
For example, Halpern cites the difficulties that people have in quitting smoking (studies of addicts regularly report nicotine among the drugs that are most difficult to quit). Yet half of all addicted smokers in the U.S. have now quit, and the large majority did so without formal treatment or self-help programs of any type. Question any table of ten or more people, and you will find multiple miracle self-cures!
In fact, surveys of drug and alcohol users, including those deeply dependent on the substances, regularly yield similar results
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Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.-Confucius
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.-Friedrich Nietzsche
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