"I decided to take three days off, to see what would happen.
It was easy."
I recently had this thought that being easy to wean off might just be another trick played by drugs to keep us addicted. For example, I have several times weaned off coffee for a month. It was easy, too, but here I am, still drinking coffee (again). Since it is so easy to wean off it, I can just stop tomorrow, so why not have another cup today...?
Also, it seems that some schools "addiction research" only consider something a relapse if it happens after 6 months not taking the drugs. So anything below 6 months is not even considered as "weaned off".
If you ever seriously question this, try picking up smoking and quitting. Or, it's possible that you don't have the appropriate brain chemistry to get addicted to things easily.
If you ever seriously question this, try picking up smoking and quitting.
HTML needs a <rhetorical> tag for statements like this. Your follow up posts make this clear, but just for the record: For the love of god, do not try picking up smoking and quitting! ;)
Ironically, though, I did have a friend that craved cigarettes only when he was really, really drunk. He would smoke at those times, but never wanted to smoke any other time. Lucky for him he's not an alcoholic, or he'd be in a race to see if the lung cancer or the liver disease would kill him first.
I don't understand the experiment? I guess I would not be able to quit smoking easily? But that wouldn't show me anything? Could be that coffee does the "easy to wean off" deception, and smoking doesn't. I suspect there are more coffee drinkers than smokers in the world (no idea, though).
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear with my meaning. I used to think similarly to you regarding addition - I could quit caffeine any time I wanted for as long as I wanted, but ultimately, I went back to soda or coffee or what have you.
So, I thought maybe that was the nature of addiction, that it was a subtle psychological thing.
THEN, I quit smoking, and the hair-pulling, hand-wringing, eye-gouging experience that followed showed me what addiction was really like.
On the other hand, my girlfriend quit smoking the same day I did, and when she quit it was like me quitting coffee; no big deal at all.
I recently had this thought that being easy to wean off might just be another trick played by drugs to keep us addicted. For example, I have several times weaned off coffee for a month. It was easy, too, but here I am, still drinking coffee (again). Since it is so easy to wean off it, I can just stop tomorrow, so why not have another cup today...?
Also, it seems that some schools "addiction research" only consider something a relapse if it happens after 6 months not taking the drugs. So anything below 6 months is not even considered as "weaned off".