Step Ten

re: rachel Addiction is not dependence. If you go in the hospital for a week or two and they give you morphine you will be dependent on the morphine meaning when they take it away you will get dope sick. This happens to everyone but a normal person (non-addict) once the dope sickness goes away, they wont have a desire to sell their TV to get more drugs. You can get medication to break dependency on drugs (methadone, f.ex) but it wont break addiction the *mental* obsession to use will not go away even if the body's *physical* need for the drug is satiated. I hope this makes sense. Reply

I have not listened to the video, but to answer your question, Rachel, let's say X, the food addict, doesn't get to chocolate cake because of his addiction, so he quickly eats a bunch of steak; X will not be hungry after that but his mental craving for sweets won't have subsided. So X not getting his chocolate cake is like us not getting our 'fix'. And if the issue is, that, we die if we don't get our fix, is actually rare in regards to direct correlation(i.e. excluding outlandish acts in an attempt to achieve satisfaction). Alcohol withdrawal is unique in that it be directly fatal. When a death occurs due to withdrawals of another type of drug, it is usually because there were other underlying health problems the user had, unbeknownst or not. And, really, how many habitual drugs users are healthy? I would say less so than non addicts, or not active addicts. Reply

step 10 interesting commentary, but because you use the example of food, I can't see how it relates to real addiction. If you don't eat the chocolate cake, you might feel hungry. If you don't take that drink, hit, short, whatever, you might go into convulsions and die. At the very least, you'll go into withdrawal. The unforunate analogy undermined some excellent points you made. But how could an addict relate to it? Reply