That's unfortunate about your cousin. I guess she hasn't really found a compelling reason to stop. Complicating any argument against drug use is the fact that addictive drugs create their own need and thereby skew the user's value system in favor of continued use. It is a very difficult thing to disentangle it from your "normal" judgments because in a sense we don't have a normal way of thinking. We change from hour to hour and day to day. Something that I like early in the morning may irritate the hell out of me late at night. One day I'll love visiting the coast, and another day I'll wonder how anybody wanting to retain some shred of sanity could even consider spending any time there. One day I'll see a sunset that will leave me breathless with awe, and another I'll see a similar or even more stunning one that feels merely nice. Add drugs onto our shifting natures and it isn't so surprising that one day she'll see that it is ruining her life, then another she'll think, fuckit I need another hit no matter what. It is a pity.
My brother gave up cigarettes so many times that he once told me that he had given up giving up. But he did eventually kill the habit. How? He just decided to. He just never had that next cigarette. Afterwards he was pissed off that he'd spent so much time and effort trying and in the end he just did it because he had reason to.
I think I was never particularly interested in heroin in the first place, so stopping never presented a great problem. My values all lie in another direction. I've known all along that speed was the drug I'd have to be careful of, so I avoided it. I think I might have had difficulty getting off that if I'd been unwise enough to get involved. I don't know... I have a feeling that my ability to think clearly is too valuable for me to get addicted to that either.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-05-13 04:17 am (UTC)My brother gave up cigarettes so many times that he once told me that he had given up giving up. But he did eventually kill the habit. How? He just decided to. He just never had that next cigarette. Afterwards he was pissed off that he'd spent so much time and effort trying and in the end he just did it because he had reason to.
I think I was never particularly interested in heroin in the first place, so stopping never presented a great problem. My values all lie in another direction. I've known all along that speed was the drug I'd have to be careful of, so I avoided it. I think I might have had difficulty getting off that if I'd been unwise enough to get involved. I don't know... I have a feeling that my ability to think clearly is too valuable for me to get addicted to that either.