The Urge Quotes

“While there may be no natural cut point between people with addiction and the rest of humanity, the fact of a continuum does not mean we cannot discern one state from another. There is a philosophical problem called the paradox of the heap: If a heap of sand is taken apart one grain at a time, at what point does it stop becoming a heap? There is no natural dividing line in that”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“I wanted to be honest and to live life without the looming fear of having to hide something. Also, as I had noticed in rehab, there was something that felt unhealthy about the desire to drink in the first place. I wanted to drink, but I also wanted to be free of the urge to drink—someday, if not that day.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“There is a recurrent and selective amnesia that the greatest drug harms -- including addiction -- are almost always caused by legal products: morphine and cocaine in the nineteenth century, stimulants and sedatives in the mid-twentieth century, opioids more recently, and, throughout and always, alcohol and tobacco.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“To this day, a central argument of the alcohol industry is that the most significant harms of alcohol are confined to a minority of excessive drinkers. This is specious—superficially correct, perhaps intuitively appealing to those with a personal experience of addiction, but in fact deeply wrong. Alcohol problems exist on a continuum, and numerous studies have found that most of the harmful effects of alcohol can be seen not among the most severe cases but in the much larger population of drinkers at the middle of the consumption bell curve—a group defined as “hazardous” or “at-risk” drinkers. People don’t need to be stereotypical alcoholics to drive drunk, get into fights, commit domestic violence, or develop alcohol-related diseases. Hazardous drinkers have fewer of these problems at an individual level, but they make up so much more of the population that they account for the most problems overall.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“Drug scares are a form of moral panic, which are almost always stoked, if not initiated by, elite forces and often used to buttress the social order in societies undergoing rapid change.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“Does history give us any hope for this kind of pragmatic and pluralistic perspective? . . .Today, amid our latest addiction epidemics, we are faced with another precious and rare opportunity for synthesis, and I have hope that we can unite around an inclusive definition of recovery as being any kind of positive change. But in order to do so, we will need to turn to the pain of our shared past, because, as in the case of individual addictions, pain and purpose are so often intertwined, and our despair comes from somewhere. The suffering of addiction is not an individual malady—it also comes from deep, ancestral wounds. We need to face that fact too, in order to fully recover, together.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“Diagnosis is the art of discernment, of distinguishing one state from another. But how exactly do we define the boundaries of what is normal? This question has dominated the scientific investigation of addiction, and mental illness more generally, for decades.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction