Topic: risk factors

Some people are surprised that someone could function at such a high level in public despite significant drug use, but that’s something addiction has been known for.

The best answer is the one we came up with to explain the selectivity of alcoholism: Differences in individual susceptibility.

For most of us, personal risk management boils down to inserting a process of logical reasoning between the desire and the action.

It’s also not too difficult to create a ‘homemade’ variety using raw ingredients purchased on the dark web and a common pill press.

There’s no blood test, no scan to aid diagnosis. Knowing intellectually that one in ten will succumb is very little help; it has no practical value in terms of predicting an individual outcome.

Problems show up first in hospital emergency rooms and in jails. Those are the closest thing we have to an early warning system.

Helps to think of an electronic cigarette as just another drug delivery device, along the lines of a high-tech crack pipe, capable of carrying a number of different substances to the brain.

The flaw in this very late-stage view of addiction… is the suggestion that somehow, addiction is the patient’s fault. Avoidable if the patient simply followed directions.

I never saw much difference between a lawyer or a doctor bitching about his job in group, and the same behavior from a CPA or a techie or a long-distance trucker.