Addicts, Why I Love Them

By Judy Lohr

Addicts know how cunning, baffling, and powerful the disease they are battling is. Families are sure they have the answer to their loved one's problems if only the addict would heed their advice! Most communities are woefully lacking in treatment programs and facilities that work. Treatment providers are outnumbered by the patients battling addiction, and they struggle with how mental illness muddies up the picture and how little government officials care about those bothersome addicts. Sometimes it's not lack of caring. Sometimes it's ignorance by officials, medical personnel, and undereducated treatment folks and lack of facilities. How much would it mean to most folks impacted by this insidious disease to be able to navigate the roadblocks to getting their loved ones the help they need and deserve? Read on to discover some of the challenges in one community. Could it be your community?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646288281

Book preview

What Is Drug Addiction?

Addiction is a chronic disease characterized by drug seeking and use that is compulsive, or difficult to control, despite harmful consequences. The initial decision to take drugs is voluntary for most people, often starting as young folks who are curious and want to be a part of a group. The danger is that repeated drug use can lead to brain changes that challenge an addicted person’s self-control and interfere with their ability to resist intense urges to take drugs. These brain changes are primary, chronic, progressive, and potentially lethal.

Primary means it is not caused by something else. Chronic means it is permanent, and there is no cure. Progressive means the disease gets worse over time. It is often best understood when compared to diabetes, which is also not curable but can be put in remission with proper treatment.

What Happens to the Brain When a Person Takes Drugs?

Most drugs affect the brain’s reward circuit, a flooding of dopamine, which is the chemical messenger for euphoria. A properly functioning reward system motivates a person to repeat behaviors needed to thrive, such as eating and engaging in other healthy activities. Surges of dopamine in the reward circuit can cause the reinforcement of pleasurable but unhealthy behaviors, like taking drugs, which leads people to repeat the behavior again and again. As a person continues to use drugs, they experience tolerance because the body’s cells have adapted to the onslaught and require more of the drug to achieve the same high they used to get with a smaller amount.

As the brain adapts to the increase in drugs, the person will experience a reduced pleasure from other things they once enjoyed, like food, sex, or social activities. The drug becomes the friend which always can be counted on to provide a numbing affect from life’s problems and the high the brain is seeking. It is reliable, works every time, and provides temporary relief for life’s pesky problems.

The challenges are many for folks who want to stop using drugs and alcohol. Most have absolutely zero patience, the dreaded P word, because they are used to changing the way they feel with their substance if they are experiencing yucky emotions. Also, they generally have a huge sense of entitlement, which is necessary to justify their continued use despite all the collateral damage they inflict on themselves and their loved ones. They are famous for starting fights so they can stomp away from the house with confidence that they deserve to use their substance because of the burdens they carry for living with the people who want them to change their behavior. They will do almost anything to keep their well-meaning enablers from getting in between them and their drug.

There Is Fear about Stopping Alcohol and Drug Use.

There is a lot of fear for folks when they think about quitting their substance, whether someone is pushing them or they are deciding this on their own. The fear of change terrifies most people. They can’t imagine a life without their drug. Will they ever have fun again? Will they be able to do it? What if all the hard work turns out to not be worth it? What if I fail, and what will I do with all these feelings I won’t know how to handle?

These questions intrigued me as