As addiction goes, I see only 4 ways of going with it. Death, jails, institutions, and recovery. I know for all of us the choice would be an easy one to make. But in addiction, the addict does not see the end results of what they are doing. I was down the road of active addiction for about 30 years more or less. Thinking this was my life and I could do what I wanted to do with it. Once an addict, always an addict, just depends if you are in recovery or not. I have been through the jails, institutions and almost death and now am on the recovery side of it. My life today is so much better. But it was not that way in the beginning. It was hard to stay clean. But as time went on it did get a little easier staying clean and sober. Sometimes in active addiction we do not see who else we may be hurting or what we are depriving ourselves of doing and seeing people. But the addiction takes such a strong hold on us we forget about all else except the next fix. What a powerful power addiction can have on us. There is no such thing as willpower to stop. We need allot more than that to get on the right road to recovery. The thoughts and cravings may still come even after clean time but we learn as time goes on how to deal with them and put them back in their place. AI have seen to many of my friends die from addiction and now I look at it as such a waist. But that is the power of addiction. We all have choices to make with it and know one can make the choice for us. We can give support and guidance and all we have to try and help but it comes down to the person themselves wanting and willing to stop. Sometimes we just have to let go and say we have done all we can and said all we can to try and help the person and just pray that somehow it gets through to them before it is to late. Know one knows which time it will be that the drug will be to much or affect us differently and that will be the end for us. It is like playing Russian Roulette but with drugs. It is sad but there will be many who will die from drugs/alcohol. No matter what we do we cannot prevent that from happening. What we can do is to try and help those who are still suffering and do our best to try and help them. Sometimes that is not even enough and we have to let them go and hope for the best. What a tragedy it is to see loved ones or friends end up dying from addiction. But that is the pill we must learn to swallow because it can happen no matter what we do. What a lose. What could that person of been if they had changed their life. Only the world knows. All we can do is our best to keep passing the message along and keep trying to help those in need. Remember, we were once where they are now and do not forget the feelings you had when using either. I am not really even sure why I wrote this but I felt it needed to come out for all of us to think about. What do we want for our lives? What do we have to do in order to achieve that goal? There are steps that need to be taken in order to get to that goal. Those steps are one day at a time and a working program that keeps us clean.

Allan