Most People with Addiction Simply Grow Out of It. Why Is This Widely Denied?
psmag.com
psmag.com
From at least my family / friends / neighbors experience, "growing out" does not apply to smoking cigarettes.
Old guy's perspective: Most of the family / friends / neighbors who I knew to be regular cigarette smokers 3-4 decades ago are now either dead, or suffer profoundly reduced qualities of life - generally due to lung cancers & other stereotypical "smoker's diseases". Not a random sample, and the value of n is too small to call it solid statistics, but...
They are difficult to quit. My father took a good dozen years to quit, with repeated failed attempts. During one of the big takeover battles of the 1980s, somebody explained the desirability of owning a cigarette manufacturer: you make them for a dime, you sell them for a dollar, and people get addicted to them.
Quite true. OTOH, I know a guy who was still a heavy smoker in his early 50's. Plenty to live for - corporate V.P. & rising, great girlfriend, his kids getting out of college.
If he had any interest in quitting, it was a well-kept secret.
~8 years later: After a few not-quite-good-enough attempts, his oncology team found a chemotherapy drug toxic enough to kill the lung cancer that had spread all through his body. Faced with "or die", and missing his oldest daughter's wedding day, he signed off on the side effect. Those were as advertised: He now lives in a hospice, and needs to a couple good, strong caregivers to safely get out of bed. On a good day. "Never really there for him" is a pretty accurate description of how well his brain is working, too.
I don't know what I have to add to the discussion, though. I came from a pretty difficult childhood, with a fairly messed-up family. I live in an area with a lot of rehabs, and a lot of my friends, through the years, have been involved in recovery. I'm comfortable around recovering addicts. I can relate to a lot of their experiences. I could have easily gone down that path. But, for whatever reason, alcoholism or addiction were never much of a problem in my life.
In some sense it must have seemed like a good idea during the active addiction. Why is it so hard to see the problem? The years of addiction (averages - cocaine, 4; marijuana, 6; alcohol, 15) -- that's a lot of years of destruction to rebuild from. That's a lot of, what, blindness? justification? lack of self awareness?