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Comment by RobertoG | Hacker News Reader

>>"I have also read that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs while in Vietnam but most of them quit when they returned to the US and did so without any kind of treatment."

I have read elsewhere that something that makes a big difference when quitting drugs is change your environment totally. That means, the group of people you spend time with, but maybe, also, work and even home. Moving away to another city or country probably helps.

Frequently, we don't realize to what point we are our environment.

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"Change your people, your places and your things" is something I have heard as a recommended best practice for overcoming addiction. I suspect there is some element of psychology involved but probably also physical effects.

It's more or a less a recipe I followed as part of my efforts to address a completely different health issue having nothing to do with addiction. I think we are in the infancy of our understanding of how germs, chemicals, etc. proliferate in our lives and shape them.

And, yes, hopping a flight back to the US and making a clean break with Vietnam -- both the place and the war -- likely helped them make a clean break from their addiction in this case.

Yes but they are really talking about habits/triggers there. They have another saying: "Wherever you go, there you are." The core assumption of twelve-step programs is that the problem is defects of character in the individual.

It's a known best practice. Best practices work well whether or not our ideas about why they work are accurate.

I'm speculating that we don't fully understand why it works and it may be effective for reasons beyond habits/triggers.

> defects of character

Addiction can be a way to deal with problems that you are having, which is incredibly uncharitable to call a "defect of character". There's nothing wrong with using, there's perhaps something wrong with being destructive. Those two things are not at all the same.

That is the terminology used by AA and derived twelve step programs. I didn't say I endorsed their world view.

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