[quote]DBCooper wrote:
This is all inaccurate. My mom works with a lot of drug addicts and she gets a steroid abuser every once in a while. Mental attachment is the epitome of addiction. As a recovering alcoholic/addict, I can attest to this. While it may take a lot of cocaine, or any drug for that matter, to develop a physical addiction, the mental addiction can start right away. You do a drug, you like the way it makes you feel or the way you think people perceive you when you are under the influence, and BAM, you can be on the road to addiction.
When I stopped drinking and drugs, I experienced very little physical withdrawal symptoms, but I can tell you I definitely drank enough and smoked enough weed and coke to have them. I ground the shit out of my teeth without even noticing it for a couple of weeks, but that was about it. The mental addiction/disease is why I relapsed a couple times within the first couple of months. It’s different for everyone. I know a lot of people who stopped drinking and went through every physical withdrawal symptom in the book, but once these stopped, they had no desire to start again.
I’ve seen people relapse after more than twenty years of sobriety and it’s not due to some physical need for drugs/booze; it’s a mental thing. In fact, the phsyical side of any addiction, including steroids, is just a side effect of a mental addiction. Steroids may have little to no physical withdrawal symptoms, but there is certainly a mental addiction. Other drugs have a very magnified physical addiction aspect, like heroin.[/quote]
You have no clue what you’re talking about. Shit, if we’re going to start demonizing stuff because people can become psychologically addicted to it, let’s start with food. Anything can become psychologically addictive. Running is psychologically addictive. Sex is psychologically addictive. Are you going to demonize those things too? Only someone who really didn’t understand the psychology of addiction would try to make the points you’re trying to make here. Psychologically addicted people simply LIKE doing what they are doing enough to ignore the consequences of those actions or lack the self awareness and control to intervene when an opportunity to abuse presents itself.
Physiological dependence IS the HALLMARK of addiction. Without physiological dependence, you have moved from legitimate medical science to pseudoscience best handled by counselors instead of DOCTORS.
The VAST (99.999999%) of steroid users (and abusers) stop using with ZERO professional intervention. Nearly ALL physiologically addictive psychoactive drugs REQUIRE professional intervention.
You don’t even know what you’re referring to when you say “mental addiction”. Those who relapse after years of sobriety tend to have abusive/addictive personalities. You’ve got your definitions entirely backwards, as mental addiction doesn’t lead to physiological addiction, but rather the affects of the drugs on brain chemistry (physiological) leads to the psychological dependence and reinforces the compulsion to use as the addict withdraws.
I’d be willing to bet money that the steroid abusers your mom sees are also abusing drugs like Vicodin, Oxy, Nubain, coke, X, amphetamines, or some other highly psychoactive recreational drug in addition to the steroids, but because steroids are the great social evil of our times, that is what is singled out as their primary malady.