Drug Addiction Quotes

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”
― Russell Brand

“Every time I draw a clean breath, I'm like a fish out of water.”
― Narcotics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous

“I think he just loved being with the bears because they didn't make him feel bad. I get it too. When he was with the bears, they didn't care that he was kind of weird, or that he'd gotten into trouble for drinking too much and using drugs(which apparently he did a lot of). They didn't ask him a bunch of stupid questions about how he felt, or why he did what he did. They just let him be who he was.”
― Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes

“There are millions of people out there who live this way, and their hearts are breaking just like mine. It’s okay to say, “My kid is a drug addict or alcoholic, and I still love them and I’m still proud of them.” Hold your head up and have a cappuccino. Take a trip. Hang your Christmas lights and hide colored eggs. Cry, laugh, then take a nap. And when we all get to the end of the road, I’m going to write a story that’s so happy it’s going to make your liver explode. It’s going to be a great day.”
― Dina Kucera, Everything I Never Wanted to Be: A Memoir of Alcoholism and Addiction, Faith and Family, Hope and Humor

“It takes away a lot of the thrill of killing yourself when people are looking for you and you're disappointing them, because it is a lot of fun when you're out there killing yourself.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed.
What about you? When's it gonna be your turn?”
― Melvin Burgess, Smack

“My daughter, Carly, has been in and out of drug treatment facilities since she was thirteen. Every time she goes away, I have a routine: I go through her room and search for drugs she may have left behind. We have a laugh these days because Carly says, “So you were lookingfor drugs I might have left behind? I’m a drug addict, Mother. We don’t leave drugs behind, especially if we’re going into treatment. We do all the drugs. We don’t save drugs back for later. If I have drugs, I do them. All of them. If I had my way, we would stop for more drugs on the way to rehab, and I would do them in the parking lot of the treatment center.”
― Dina Kucera, Everything I Never Wanted to Be: A Memoir of Alcoholism and Addiction, Faith and Family, Hope and Humor

“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? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?”
― Russell Brand

“I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.
I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opes a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space.”
― Melvin Burgess, Smack

“The decision-making part of the brain of an individual who has been using crystal meth is very interesting. When Carly and Andy were in their apartment, they ran out of drugs. They sold every single thing they had except two things: a couch and a blow torch. They had to make a decision because something had to be sold to buy more drugs. A normal person would automatically think, Sell the blow torch. But Andy and Carly sat on the couch, looking at the couch and looking at the blow torch, and the choice brought intense confusion. The couch? The blow torch? I mean, we may not need the blow torch today, but what about tomorrow? If we sell the couch, we can still sit wherever we want. But the blow torch? A blow torch is a very specific item. If you’re doing a project and you need a blow torch, you can’t substitute something else for it. You would have to have a blow torch, right? In the end, they sold the couch.”
― Dina Kucera, Everything I Never Wanted to Be: A Memoir of Alcoholism and Addiction, Faith and Family, Hope and Humor

“The Memory Of You Is Like A Drug To Me”
― Jeremy Aldana

“What would you rather have?"
"Cheeseburger and a small fry. Coke classic. Better yet, dope classic."
"Sure. I'll take a milkshake. What's the special flavor this week, chocolate Jack Daniels?"
"Strawberry scotch."
"Stick one of those paper umbrellas in mine."
"Shove a syringe in mine. And a plastic tombstone. RIP, baby. He was born a rock star. He died a junkie."
"Rock in peace."
[...]
"He wanted the world and lost his soul. [...] Sold it all for rock and roll. Lost his heart in a needle. Found his life in the grave. The road to hell is paved in marijuana leaves. Now he rocks in peace.”
― L.F. Blake, The Far Away Years

“I thought over and over about what I was going to do when Carly overdosed and died. How would we go on? And then I knew: I wouldn’t go on. And then I realized that it was just going to be too painful to actually have to watch her die. Right in front of me. My daughter was dying. That’s when I snapped.”
― Dina Kucera, Everything I Never Wanted to Be: A Memoir of Alcoholism and Addiction, Faith and Family, Hope and Humor

“Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.”
― Russell Brand

“Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junktime and junkmetabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness anymore than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Looking back, I have come to realize that the gang lifestyle back then—the fame, the respect, and the recognition—was stronger and powerful than any drug. We were serious with what we were dealing with. It was like a do or die situation. Shelton ‘Apples’ Burrows reform gang leader”
― Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father

“I got up the next morning with morphine hangover. I poured myself a large glass of cold milk, which is an antidote for morphine.”
― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“Most people who die of drug overdoses know it will happen to them oneday. They don't just realise it will happen to them sooner than they think.”
― Mzee Bryan Moseni Kabamba

“It had never been that addicts don’t care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“The longest I ever stayed up on meth was something like fourteen days. I started seeing these little creatures in my house. They looked so real to me that to this very day I could swear I actually saw them. They were these little men who looked like Stretch Armstrong dolls, but green. They were being manufactured under my house. They came up out of the ground and ran around my living room, and I would run around my house, chasing them, and shooting my gun at them. Sometimes I hit one, and it died. Then, all of a sudden, the wall opened up, and the creatures grabbed him and dragged him back inside, so I couldn't show anybody. That's why nobody else could see them but me.”
― Todd Bridges, Killing Willis: From Diff'rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted

“Can you dream about anything? can you really be sure you are not dreaming? can you dream - are you dreaming - have you pinched yourself - to see that weren’t dreaming?”
― Christiane F., Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo

“Dark Child by Stewart Stafford

Moondust down the fire curtain
Carried Syd to the darkest side,
Trespass became a prison term,
A non-compos mentis dark child.

From gambolling nymph with a lute,
To an imp falling over instruments,
A thousand-yard stare sucked in,
Vacant eyes drew like a black hole.

Riderless horse, a living déjà vu,
The spectral shell of our brother,
Ambled towards us at his nadir,
We wept for the shuffling stranger.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A little pinprick changed my whole life. That’s all it takes—it’s that quick.”
― Paige Dearth, A Little Pinprick

“A group of Christian Bale doppelgängers, The Machinist Bales, not the Batman Bales, lounge on the corner of the street. Drug addicts. Drug fiends sit with noon and needles. The noon, the “bread” is naked, there in the middle for mere show.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“Pipes filled with crack burn at the same time American flags do. Just another paradox in the life and times of modern-day Iranian. The '80s introduced the world to the crack epidemic. It wasn't long before crystallized cocaine found its way from the mean streets of New York to the beaten-down streets of Tehran.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“I mean if you're going to kill yourself, there are faster ways than letting [meth] chew up your brain one lobe at a time"

"Do enough crank, your heart will give up before your brain does. Most people don't do enough to die, though. They just do enough to keep getting more and more stupid."

"Like stupid enough to smuggle meth into a place like this?”
― Ellen Hopkins (Author)

“I mean if you're going to kill yourself, there are faster ways than letting [meth] chew up your brain one lobe at a time"

"Do enough crank, your heart will give up before your brain does. Most people don't do enough to die, though. They just do enough to keep getting more and more stupid."

"Like stupid enough to smuggle meth into a place like this?”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse