I think there is a genetic factor involved [...] If there is a history of alcoholism in your family, watch it.

Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.

If a child has an older sibling involved in an addiction, there is a 90 percent chance that he or she will get involved too.

I don't have a drinking addiction but yes I have a tendency to drink a lot. When I start, I don't stop. I guess it's in my blood; you know how my family is. They are all very fond of alcohol. So, yes it's in my genes to drink.

I'm addicted. Period. Y'know, I mean like... And it's weird because so many of the population, so much of the population is addicted and err... Y'know, compulsive and impulsive... I'm really like... compulsive about shit... When I can't fix my head with... y'know, with a certain drug or whatever, I'll clean something up, y'know, or I'll, I get really like... fucking fidgety and uncomfortable and I get... I fly off the handle easy, y'know, and it's like... if it's not... if I'm not gorging myself on-, on-, on one thing, I'm fucking... I'm trying to fill that... that hole some other way, y'know what I mean? It's always this great feeling of need and it doesn't ne-, necessarily have to be of anything in particular, it's just something that you don't know what it is which drives you that much more insane sometimes... y'know, and that's what a lot of people today, uhm, suffer from, and a lot of people don't even realise it, y'know. I don't profess to know everything about it but, y'know... I don't know... I just, uh, know that there's that hole that needs to be filled and, uh, a lot of people die trying.

I'm sick. It's passed down through my family. I am an addict. I'm sick.

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

We need to understand that victims of trauma are more prone to all forms of addiction because their baseline of stress is different.

Addictions come from shortages in infancy. People try to compensate this way. Alcoholism is generally produced from a shortage in mother's milk. And heroin addiction is usually due to a lack of being, the absence of recognition; the drug fills the emptiness of not being loved.

The question is never “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” The research literature is unequivocal: most hard-core substance abusers come from abusive homes.

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

faith without doubt is addiction

What are you -- some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...

Most addictions are attempts to find happiness in people’s souls.