That Thing Which Screams a Whisper:

BIRMINGHAM-Addictions can be deadly. I should have been dead already, perhaps many times over, from overdoing combinations of opiates, methadone, "Liquid G," and the queen that locked me in the tower, crystal meth. The urgency and need for former addicts to rise and speak to those unaware of the actual grueling aspects of opting to use drugs has never been in such demand. The need is so great, now more than ever, to spread the word that using even "low-grade" or those seen as "lesser, safer" drugs should be avoided at all cost.

Behavioral Gateways

Even if a drug's addiction rate is not very significant, the behavior can be. See, even now, there are those readers who are justifying using by telling themselves "Okay, I just won't get to that point. I just won't use beyond that level." Do you think anyone planned to allow it to get to any further point besides the levels of enjoyment they experienced at the beginning? In this way, it is plain to see, addicts do not control drugs. The drugs control the addict.

After having been clean four months in 2001, fresh out of county jail where an inmate is not allowed to smoke cigarettes in Jefferson County, a very wise drug counselor suggested to me that I try to abstain from picking up cigarettes again. He said that this was due to the fact that the behavior can lead to the desire for further use of substances. Being in another world for four months, not having been exposed to anything remotely like the former life I had lived before jail, I had not encountered many things which reminded me so vividly of using drugs the way certain behaviors and actions in the free world would. Alas, always willing to ignorantly throw myself out there as my own little Guinea Pig, I did not heed his warnings. I know now that he was absolutely correct. Smoking cigarettes again, though legal, were actually a gateway into the desire for further behaviors, having come from a problematic addictive history, such as mine had been.

Significant and Permanent Change