Except "addict" is a loaded term, which implies... well, unequivocally maladaptive behavior.
You seldom hear about people who lie to their loved ones about their hidden coffee stash, or steal from their child's piggybank to sustain their caffeine fix.
In a situation where coffee would be banned, we would in all likeliness see a rise in coffee smuggling, a drop in quality of coffee, and coffee addicts would face problem due to the illegality of the stuff : imagine that one day, your dealer is all out of coffee. That would cause a withdrawal syndrome. So people would keep stash of coffee, and other behavior charateristic of 'drugs addict'
More likely if caffeine were banned. If coffee were banned, those with a dependence (which is most likely on caffeine, not coffee) would substitute other sources. Like tea. Or soda.
(People might smuggle coffee if it were banned, the way they smuggle Cuban cigars into the US, but as a prohibited luxury rather than an item of dependence that there was no legal means to fulfill.)
You do realize that caffeine is more addictive than cannibas right? If there is an illegal drug trade for that pot then I can't imagine people would just give up on coffee when it's harder to kick.
There's no one accepted unidimensional criteria for addictiveness. Among the criteria generally used, some put caffeine more addictive than cannabis, some less (though all put both of them extremely low.)
> If there is an illegal drug trade for that pot then I can't imagine people would just give up on coffee when it's harder to kick.
If it is coffee, but not the addictive component caffeine) that is prohibited, and there are lots of other sources of caffeine, such a trade, I argue, would be more like the trade in likewise-prohibited Cuban cigars -- a luxury. Caffeine addicts would have a ready supply of alternative sources of caffeine and thus not really need the illicit trade, just as nicotine addicts do when Cuban cigars are prohibited.
Withdrawal from physical dependency of high doses of caffeine is decidedly unpleasant (with the potential for week long bouts of diarrhea, night sweats, uncontrollable shaking, fever and massive headaches, for example - from personal experience after going of pre-workout supplements with doses in the 400mg+ range of caffeine)
I also seldom hear of people who lie to their loved ones about their hidden drug/alcohol stash, or steal from their child's piggybank to sustain their drug/alcohol fix. Really, I do often hear the same sad generic story which you refer to, but there are never any specifics nor any thing else that would prove it is actually as common as is purported.
She could either pay the rent or buy alcohol. She purchased alcohol and was evicted form her home.
Living homeless in the park, she and her children didn't eat for two days. When she received money, she decided to continue forgoing food to spend the money on alcohol.
After over a month of homelessness, during an Indiana winter that was below freezing during the day and colder at night, she was offered private housing and food for herself and her children. The only catch was that she'd have to remain sober. She preferred the alcohol. My wife has permanent medical problems from sleeping in those conditions.
She didn't steal from her daughter's piggy bank to buy alcohol. She did use her daughter's social security number to apply for a student loan, then use the loan money to go on a bender.
Alcoholism isn't just a generic scare story told by DARE officers to keep kids from drinking. It's a real issue killing a real woman named Virginia.
This is a cruel joke that gets played on drunks. She didn't prefer the alcohol, she was/is addicted; and our society deals with addiction in probably the worst possible way. They may as well have asked her to jump over the moon. Rational people don't do that to themselves or their families. I didn't say that these things never happen. I said they are more rare than some would have you believe. I have my own horrible story in that vein (my father), but what I don't do is use it to pander to peoples' emotions in an effort to further perpetuate, or perhaps even expand the disaster that is the drug war. Addiction is an ugly unfortunate thing that exists, and as sad and regrettable as your wife's tale, and my father's tale, and the tales of others are; using these tales to support the continuance of, or the heaping of even more hardship (criminal sanctions) upon the susceptible/unfortunate/whatever is and always was the wrong thing to do.
You're absolutely right that the choice she was presented with was no choice at all. She prefered alcohol over housing in the same way that Stephen Hawking prefers sitting over walking. That was the point that I was trying to make - there are people who cannot make rational decisions on these matters.
As for the drug war, my wife has tens of thousands of dollars of medical debt because some bureaucrat decided that it's more important that my mother-in-law be punished for being an alcoholic than that a child might have a warm place to sleep at night. Punishing addicts makes as much sense as punishing cancer patients.
Same here. Best regards.
Thanks, but that's not what I said, you're mistaken on that account.
>This isn't something about which people are simply exaggerating.
The stories don't need exaggeration.
My response, and what I find offensive about these stories' use in pro-drug war propaganda, is that they are being used to pander to peoples' emotions in an effort to support the current dreadful state of affairs.
Actually, this brings up an perfect example of the first poster's point. Smoking cigarettes was socially acceptable at one point. Now, it's considered a bad, unhealthy habit. I've known quite a of people who hide, or attempt to hide, their habit from their friends. And I'm quite sure that a good number of parents have taken money from their kids piggybanks to buy cigarettes.
She never did.
Try Utah some time. Great place, interesting culture, and occasionally, secret coffee stashes.