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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I know that addiction is an awful thing but I find the comparison to cancer somewhat offensive, especially since I lost my Dad to a very aggressive cancer and I have seen numerous other friends and acquaintances suffer through it. You don't have choices with cancer, you can't prevent it and often there are no effective treatments. If you are an addict, you can make a conscience choice to turn your life around or not. [/quote]

I am very sorry to hear about your dad.

I am not the PP you are arguing with, but rather the PP with an addicted brother. Unfortunately, your offense just shows that you don't understand addiction, as a disease. That's okay, I do not understand M.S. or cancer, for instance, or any other health issues like an expert, because I am not one. The concept that addicts always have a "choice" is misleading. Addiction is amazingly, amazingly powerful. There is a physical element involved. Withdrawal causes excruciating physical and mental anguish. Not to mention, once an addict removes him / herself from the drugs, on top of the physical pain and confusion is a return of the original mental health symptoms that in many cases led to the addiction. While there are certainly some people who quite willfully start using hard drugs out of a desire to be "cool," or something else less driven by mental health than just recklessness, the vast majority of addicts are desperately self-medicating their mental illness. And many, like Amy Winehouse and my brother, started using as children. So the "choice" to start using is not as black and white as you see it, and the "choice" to recover is enormously hard. There are some cancers (clearly, as you say, not your father's) that people can, in fact, prevent or at least make it less likely they'll get. Do smokers deserve to die? Do people who worshipped the sun before we really knew how bad it was deserve to die? Does your father deserve to have random people on a listserv talking about whether or not he had a "choice" to recover or prevent his cancer without knowing exactly what type of cancer he is dealing with and the circumstances of his life? NO. He doesn't. And neither does an addict deserve to have a group of people feeling offended that someone might compare his illness with any other, unless that person knows his life story and why he is addicted, and what it means to be addicted, and why people become addicted, and what is really involved with recovery.

Unless you have walked a mile in another's footsteps.........  [/quote]

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