Alcohol Addiction Quotes

Addiction should never be treated as a crime.

It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress.

It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.

Do not let your fire go out.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

Reality is an illusion created by a lack of alcohol.

I don't drink these days. I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.

When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't.

Working with drug addicts, alcoholics, and so-called juvenile delinquents in New York City convinced me that instead of working with individuals, more effective methods would deal with the societal conditions that create dysfunctional behaviors in the first place.

If you’re an alcoholic or a drug addict, we flirt with death.

We pull ourselves to the brink of destruction and if we’re lucky we pull ourselves back. We all have that in us.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.

The abuse of food, alcohol, or drugs is essentially a material response to a need that isn't really physical at its foundation.. What we are looking for is pure joy rather than mere sensation, or even oblivion of sensation. Addiction is unrecognized spiritual craving.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

During my drinking decades, I lived like a pig.

My room was a hazardous pile of stilettos, tube tops, wine bottles, ashtrays, and old magazines. I valued nothing. Everything that came into my life was disposable: clothes, opportunities, people. My bedroom looked as if my insides had spilled out onto the floor.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.

I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I've ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction.

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

It took me a long time to reach the bottom and it went through various stages.

I went from drugs into an alcohol stage. For a while, one feels, "Ah, I've kicked drugs," but what I discovered was I had another addiction instead.

There's so much fear involved in trying to do something you don't know how to do that drugs and alcohol can become a big part of your life if you have an addictive personality or are very unsure, which most songwriters are.

The Teen Challenge ministry was born out of those humble early days of ministry.

It now includes over 500 drug and alcohol rehab centers around the world, even in Muslim countries. These include homes for girls and women addicts and alcoholics, all which are reaching many.

One of the things you learn in rehab is that you're responsible for your own actions.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

The worst thing you can do for your loved one caught in alcoholism or addiction is to help the person continue in the deception that he or she is OK. Your best course of action is to speak the truth in love (see Eph. 4:15) and don't allow him or her to escape the consequences of wrong behavior.

Worse that drugs is drug trafficking.

Much worse. Drugs are a disease, and I don't think that there are good drugs or that marijuana is good. Nor cigarettes. No addiction is good. I include alcohol. The only good addiction is love. Forget everything else.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober.

An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

Saying you're an alcoholic and an addict is like saying you're from Los Angeles and from California.

Once you've been overweight you never want to be overweight again, so you keep going, keep going, like for any addiction. Health can be an addiction, it doesn't have to be drugs or alcohol.

If I'd done a quarter of the things of which I'm accused, I'd be pickled in alcohol, I'd be a registered drug addict and would have sired half the children in the world's cricket-playing countries

I tried sniffing Coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck in my nose.

I will lift mine eyes unto the pills.

Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish.

Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.

I don't know how I made those movies.

I went out every single night, I smoked pot every single day. I drank. We did everything, but I never became a drug addict or an alcoholic. Other friends are dead, many of them. So many people in this retrospective...in Female Trouble, almost everyone is dead.