ot: about addiction

[eddief]

it seems some just fall, others break.

I saw Leigh Steinberg interviewed the other day and this is a short take. From zillionaire to zero due to an addictive personality. Philip Seymoure Hoffman not as lucky...I guess.

I have been drinking for pleasure since the age of 13, now 63. Also experimented with other fun stuff, not smack. I have never ever felt as if I would fall or break. I do believe we are DNA-bound in this regard and those of us not prone may have a very hard time giving sympathy to those who are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZhK7FfbGA8

[bikingshearer]

it seems some just fall, others break.

I saw Leigh Steinberg interviewed the other day and this is a short take. From zillionaire to zero due to an addictive personality. Philip Seymoure Hoffman not as lucky...I guess.

I have been drinking for pleasure since the age of 13, now 63. Also experimented with other fun stuff, not smack. I have never ever felt as if I would fall or break. I do believe we are DNA-bound in this regard and those of us not prone may have a very hard time giving sympathy to those who are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZhK7FfbGA8

I have no doubt that DNA has something to do with it, at least in some instances. There are way too many "alcoholism runs in the family" cases for it not be so. I doubt if that is the only factor, but it is definitely one of them. It is clear, though, that some of us are much more pre-disposed to addiction than others. I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't particularly pre-disposed. I did enough, er, field research in my youth to be able to say that with certainty.

Whether it's a silly-straw gene (thanks for that great analogy, Dennis Miller) or something else that stirs the pot, it increasingly clear that it is all about brain chemistry And God almighty. it is powerful. I watched my best friend finally succeed in drinking himself to death at age 50, and watched how his addiction was powerful enough to overwhelm the love he had for his three year old daughter (long story - suffice to say I figured out he was driving drunk with his little girl not strapped into a car seat, and had to rat him out to his ex-wife to get custody rights changed as the only way I could see to protect the little girl). I saw my friend with his daughter when he was sober - at those times, he was a great father, and would have walked through fire for her. The fact that something, anything, could overpower that love speaks volumes about the power of addiction.

The other example is my father. He was a supremely rational, level-headed man. There only thing that I ever saw that could make him irrational was nicotine. (Well, stop-and-go traffic drove him nuts, too, but I suspect that affects a different part of the brain.) He smoked all my life and for years before that, and to his dying day (yes, from lung cancer) he swore up and down that all the second-hand smoke studies were flawed, unreliable and just plain wrong. He also claimed that "didn't inhale" his cigars, so there was real harm being done. (Aside from the obvious nonsense of that, it ignores all the years of cigarette and pipe smoking he did before he switched to cigars). Anything that could make my Dad so irrational for so many years is a force to be reckoned with.