WILLPOWER IS NOT ISSUE FOR TRUE ADDICTS

Because of my quirky and often dark sense of humor, I get told a lot that
I'm sick in the head.

How true that is.

I suffer from a disease known as addiction. For years, I thought the reason
I was unable to stop drinking and doing drugs was because I was weak-willed
or lacked a certain moral fortitude. Once I was exposed to treatment and
the disease concept of addiction, it all began to make sense.

For a lot of people, classifying overindulgence in drugs and alcohol as a
disease is a cop-out. I still have a few friends who, despite being very
familiar with my struggles, don't by the whole disease thing. My buddy John
is convinced that, through no fault of my own, it's simply a lack of will
on my part that I was unable to stop using.

That's easy for John to say, though. He's a respected journalist in
Florida, an ace in his field and one of the best editors I ever worked
with. John also has a daily ritual after work: A few beers and a few puffs
from a joint. He's been doing this for years, and after leaving hard drugs
behind in his teens, that ritual has pretty much remained the same.

He doesn't drink until he passes out, although I've seen him pound more
than a few at a party. He doesn't smoke a whole bag of pot -- most of the
time, it's not even an entire joint. He'll smoke a third of it and put it
away for the next night, and the night after that. When I talk to him on
the phone, he's not hung over at work, and he's not blasted out of his mind
at home.

And he can stop when he wants to. Before he moved to Florida, he put the
weed away for two months so he could pass a drug test. It didn't bother him
- -- he just put it down. He didn't go into withdrawal, he didn't sit around
stressing out because he couldn't smoke. He just didn't do it, and to him,
it was no big deal.

That's where mine and John's paths diverge. No matter how hard I've tried,
I've never, ever been able to stop. I can't do just a little bit -- say, a
third of a joint. I smoke the whole thing, drink the whole six-pack and
want to keep going, no matter how wrecked I might be.

It's hard to get that point across: I can't stop. Even when I want to .
even when I tell myself I need to slow down, I can't. Once that internal
switch is turned on, I keep going, doing more and harder until my body
won't let me go on or I run out of money.

If I'm drinking, I want to smoke pot. If I smoke pot, I want some cocaine.
If I'm snorting coke, I want to shoot it. If I'm shooting it, I want
heroin, or Oxycontin. And the more I do it, the sooner that want becomes a
need. That's why I can't allow myself to think in terms of having ``just
one drink.'' I've never been able to do ``just one'' of anything, and I've
never been able to just drink. It always, always, always leads to something
harder.

And it gets to the point where it takes over my whole life. It consumes me,
from the moment my eyes fly open in the mornings. When I'm in full-blown
addiction, my day doesn't start with a leisurely breakfast, a scan of the
morning paper and a shower. Instead, I have a freight train running wide
open in my head: ``Do I have any drugs left? If not, do I have any money to
get some? If I do, will I be able to find it? If I don't, what can I pawn,
sell or steal to get some? Will I be able to get enough?''

No amount of words can get across that overwhelming, consuming hunger. That
siege, that need. It can't be described, unless you've felt it. Everything
else is obliterated -- all concerns for a job, all love for family, all
loyalty to friends. I've stolen from my mother and father, broken into a
girlfriend's apartment, taken money from the register of a friend's
business. I've degraded and shamed myself, because I HAD to have my drugs.

Does that sound like a simple lack of will or desire? Does that sound like
a moral failing? To be driven on pure instinct, to lose all humanity, to
care nothing about what happens to me or what others think -- to exist in a
hell of my own making and live only to feed that gnawing black hunger -- do
you honestly think anyone would choose to keep going and doing those things
and living that way if they could stop?

I know I sure didn't. In my active addiction, I didn't have a choice. My
entire life centered around one thing -- feeding my addiction. The rest of
my world fell apart, and I didn't care. I lived to use and used to live, as
the literature of my recovery program puts it. Nothing else mattered.

The disease concept is a controversial one, but having lived that life,
it's the only explanation that makes any sense to me. Others may disagree,
but that's OK. Those of us who have lived that waking hell know in our
hearts that it's the only truth that matters.

Steve Wildsmith is the Weekend editor for The Daily Times. His
entertainment stories and column appear every Friday in the Weekend section.