Well, I'm like a drug addict, I'm always saying I'm going to stop, and then I don't, what I've said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive.
It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing?
There seems is predominantly a white person's drug addiction epidemic, so that's why you see white people in our film, Warning: This Drug May Kill You.
Drug addiction is tearing our communities and our country apart, and until we decide we're going to think differently about it, until we decide that we're going to invest as a country in prevention and treatment, until we decide that as individuals we're going to step up and do our part to address this epidemic, we're not going to solve this.
Never work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul or build a decent family life or help you sleep at night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the highest number of imprisoned people in the world. Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever confuse wealth or fame with character.
You know, for a long time being a heavily tattooed woman was viewed as something gross, or you're either a criminal or a drug addict. It feels good to be a good representation of the art form versus being the token tattoo girl. I'm just glad that people even consider it to be sexy, because I think I'm just a big nerd so it works out.
Drug addiction is an incredibly difficult challenge to manage on one's own. When I think of all the stories I've heard from people, the common denominator is that they all were ultimately able to find somebody who was willing to support them. Maybe it was someone they knew, like a parent or a sibling or a friend; other times it was a treatment center with a compassionate staff who didn't give up on them. That made all the difference.
I just pick the best roles that are left over, and they usually aren't the heterosexual, leading-man, non-drug-addict parts. And once you get into doing them, people know you do them.
You really can't just take someone who's got a drug addiction and just put 'em in rehab. It doesn't work that way. You can't choose it for them. They have to choose it for themselves - because that's scary. It's really hard.
There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.
From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.
We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.
The pervasive brutality in current fiction - the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord - is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world.
I remember once Prince dropped by to see me when I was in Minneapolis and I was sick, with a bag of cough drops and a spoon of cough medicine. I said to him, "Hey, can I have another spoon of that? It's just over the counter," and he'd go, "No, I didn't come here to start up new drug addictions for you." And I was like, "C'mon, give me that bottle!" He was very watchful over me.
I was a big rugby player and into my motocross, so I lost loads of weight and a rumor went around the town that I had picked up a drug addiction!
The thing we want for all our kids is that they be connected with a learning community and that they have strong social and familial relationships. If we can do whatever we can do to create that and to reduce bullying and to reduce the kind of pain and shame so many kids feel for so many reasons, that stuff is going to reduce drug addiction.
You don't have to be a drug addict to care for your mind.
I placed myself in amongst the animal kingdom so that I would be able to confront myself actually. It did not start out as the intention to serve and protect the lives of the innocent within the animal kingdom. I wanted to test myself, to see if I was able to overcome the dire situation that I was headed toward. By this of course I mention the fact that I was an alcoholic and drug addict before I left to live in the wild.
In the gay world, some of the most enriching and incredibly life-affirming and shaping relationships, very often between younger boys and older men, can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys. They can save those young boys from desolation, suicide and drug addiction, all sorts of things, providing they're consensual.
My goal is to end mass incarceration and change the laws to stop locking up low-level, nonviolent drug charges. Stop charging drug addicts as criminals.
The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education.
It turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction - behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry.
I've lost over 800 West Virginians the last year. Lost their lives to opiate and drug addiction. This is something that we've got to fight. We need to have treatment centers that take care of people. We need to start basically education from kindergarten all the way through adulthood. We need to get involved and stop this epidemic that's going on that's just ravaging.
Right now we have millions of people in our country who are suffering in isolation, thinking that they are the only ones who are dealing with drug addiction, who don't realize that on their own block there are other people and families. They think they're alone and they think they're going to be judged and they don't want to talk about it. But when people do come forward and share their stories it's incredibly liberating, and it gives other people permission to tell their stories too.
I think God is back, I think there is a huge amount of spiritual interest in the country. And I think the bishops are supportive of it because they see people's lives being changed. They see the difference. I see people who've been in prison, whose lives have been messed up, who've been alcoholics, who've been drug addicts, set free and contributing to society.
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