Crack Addiction Quotes

Owning a dog is slightly less expensive than being addicted to crack.

Jesus. The taste of her-my memory was unforgivably inadequate. I feel like a recovering crack addict who just fell off the wagon and never wants to climb back on.

I'm addicted to you. You're my crack, and you also happen to be the only dealer.

Because what we associate with the idea of love is purely chemical. It can be broken down into scientifically proven phases: it starts with a dose of testosterone and estrogen, what we would think of as ‘lust,’ followed by the goofy ‘lovesick’ phase, which is a combination of adrenaline, dopamine, and a drop in serotonin levels—which, by the way, makes our brains behave exactly like the brains of crack addicts—and ends up, if we make it through phases one and two, with ‘attachment,’ where the body produces oxytocin and vasopressin, which basically make us want to cuddle excessively. It’s science. That’s all.

Sometimes being a nice person is all about knowing when to be an asshole.

I"d done more apologizing in the past week than a politician with a crack pipe and a sex addiction.

I can't be any more addicted to it than I already am,"Jamie said slowly, as though he'd rehearsed this, and then waiting for a cue Nick obviously had no intention of giving." Think about crack!" Jamie added, clearly struck by insperation. "Yes! It's like I'm a crack addict, and you're my friend the drug dealer who gives me crack for free, and I know you're just trying to be a good friend, but every time I think 'Wow, this crack might be a little bit of a problem for me,' you're there to say, 'Have some more delicious crack.' Am I making sense?" Nick stared."Hardly ever in your life.

These are his people, this congregation of misfits, crack addicts, and drunks, the unshaven, unwashed, unemployed, and unwanted.

I got addicted. News, particularly daily news, is more addictive than crack cocaine, more addictive than heroin, more addictive than cigarettes.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

In the absence of love, sex ceases to be an instrument of intimacy and turns into a weapon causing dents and cracks in the relationship.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .

Because Damien Stark is like crack to me. Seductive and very, very addictive.

.. an emergency stash of Thin Mints. Frickin' Girl Scouts. Those things were way to addictive. They had to be laced with crack." Charlie Davidson Fourth Grave Beneath my Feet

Don't ever think you're better than a drug addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well, if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something else you shouldn't be doing.

Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem, And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, to, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they'd think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

They all told me I had a fear of intimacy, but I vehemently disagreed; I craved intimacy like a crack addict. The problem was that I craved intimacy to the same burning degree that I detested commitment. Being a statue was such a perfect job.

When you're younger you're so happy to get some good loving you convince yourself you're in love, can't live with out it, and chase the dick like a crack addict after the pipe, or chase the bad sex hoping something happened to the man over night and the next time it'll be good.

You're at the crack addict's apartment? Having a little sandwich?" he says. From the tone of his voice, you'd think I just told him I was hanging out at a playground wearing a NAMBLA t-shirt.

There is no fact, no detail of our life too sordid for God's intervention. God has seen murder. God has seen rape. God has seen drug addiction's and alcoholism's utter degradation. God is available to us no matter what our circumstances. God can find us in a crack house. God can find us crumpled in a doorway or cowering on a park bench. We need only reach out to discover that God reaches back. We are led a step at a time even when we feel we are alone. Sometimes God talks to us through people. Sometimes God reaches us through circumstances or coincidence. God has a million ways to reach out to us, and when we are open to it, we begin to sense the touch of God coming to us from all directions.

We were locked onto each other as though we had just discovered this incredible thing you could do with two mouths pressing close and moist against each other. And the taste of him... Horrifyingly, unbearably sweet -- sweet in the way crack must feel hitting the bloodstream of an addict after years of staying clean.

No other drug can compete with cannabis for its ability to satisfy the innate yearnings for Archaic boundary dissolution and yet leave intact the structures of ordinary society. If every alcoholic were a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis, the social consequences of the ‘drug problem’ would be transformed. Yet, as a society we are not ready to discuss the possibility of self-managed addictions and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants we ally ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come.

I had never been to a rodeo before. I had no idea how crazy white people could be. Considering I had been abandoned by a white, crack addict mother, I should have known.

Fame is more addictive than crack. Adults who lose fame--one-hit wonders, for example--usually tailspin into depression, though they try to act like they're above it. They don't want to admit the truth. Their whole life is a lie, a desperate scramble for another dose of that most potent of drugs. Fame

It wasn't as if crack was getting great press in the South Bronx in 1999, but it took a particular kind of idiot to wake up one day and say, 'Angel dust is a product I've heard nothing but good about, and it's about time I was involved.

There is a beautiful moment in the bible when the prophet Elijah feels God’s resence. The Scriptures say that a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but God was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. It was the whisper of God. Today we can hear the whisper where we least expect it; in a baby refugee and in a homeless rabbi, in crack addicts and displaced children, in a groaning creation.

Rachel Resnick's story of love lost and love sought cracks open the timeworn addiction narrative to release something raw, probing, brave, and redemptive. The courage it took to write this story is challenged only by the courage it must have taken to live it. I sit in awe of such unflinching honesty. LOVE JUNKIE is memoir at its very best.

So are you an inmate or a rubbernecker?" she asks. "Rubbernecker," I answer without hesitation. "You?" "I'm a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness." I'd be surprised at her forthrightness, but that's addicts for you. The twelve steps crack 'em open and then they can't shut up.

I forgive you." The power of those words rushes through me, purging all the torturous memories of my youth. It gushes into all the cracks my mom's neglect and addictions have created, filling them with a mercy that's not my own.

A family is a cracked mirror that nevertheless reflects us accurately.

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime. There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love: To Gaylene deceased To Ray deceased To Francy permanent psychosis To Kathy permanent brain damage To Jim deceased To Val massive permanent brain damage To Nancy permanent psychosis To Joanne permanent brain damage To Maren deceased To Nick deceased To Terry deceased To Dennis deceased To Phil permanent pancreatic damage To Sue permanent vascular damage To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage . . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

Stop thinking about it, Nik!" "What?" He grinned and shook his head. "You know what. You're looking at my hair like an addict at a crack carnival. Enough already." "... I know enough about you to know you won't stop until you get my hair; and at a risk of you taking my scalp with you, I'll go.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, I watch her take out her gear. She’s been smoking so much the room stinks of it. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen her do it so often I’ve resisted the urge. It’s surreal, like I’m watching me from outside my body. My willpower is fragile at the best of times, but my resolve is always weaker in the evening. I feel a dread and a revulsion for what I’m about to do, but there’s a stronger feeling, an unutterable longing. I crack. ‘Give us a line,’ I say.

Here is an image. The young woman who lives in the Port Authority Bus Terminal has been a crack addict; she has lied, cheated, and stolen. She has learned to manipulate people. At twenty-six, she has wasted her education and lost several jobs. When she is asleep in her blanket on the floor, there is no way for a passerby to know whether or not she is trying to kick her habit and better herself. Yet, according to the article, she constantly finds that bus passengers put one dollar bill, two dollar bills, even a twenty-dollar bill into her blanket while she is asleep. Jesus stoops down to us in our miserable condition, bringing the gifts of new life. He does not ask us what we are doing to make ourselves better; he just gives the gift. He does not ask if we are working to turn ourselves around; he does not ask for a receipt; he puts redemption into our blanket.

You are hardwired for the pleasure of God. And this works for marriage. Imagine sole sourcing your pleasure receptors to be conditioned habitually to find satisfaction in one person. You build deep-seated emotional, spiritual even biological connection to that one person — this is what you are designed for. Do not build deviant behaviors that cause destruction. Porn is like crack. We can lie to ourselves about it – that we can casually dabble around with it. If you think you are not addicted, try going three weeks without it. You

Social media is like crack—immediately gratifying and hugely addictive.

She’s crack and I’m totally addicted.

It's not the substance that hooks you, it's the emotions," he explained. "There is a crack somewhere in our spirits, and we have to heal that before anything.

They all dressed like crack addicts. A boy wore a white leather belt as a tie.

Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

They all told me I had a fear of intimacy, but I vehemently disagreed; I craved intimacy like a crack addict. The problem was that I craved intimacy to the same burning degree that I detested commitment. Being a statue was such a perfect job.

You didn’t force me. Against my better judgment, and despite all the therapy sessions and spells, I just couldn’t help myself. You’re like crack to my heart.” His gaze narrowed. “Did you just compare me to a highly addictive, dangerous drug?” “Yes.” “Mon amour.

It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of color of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon. It may even be greater than the scope of mathematics. We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose. Some dust of our bodies may end up in a horse, wasp, cockerel, frog, flower, or leaf, but for every one of these sensational assemblies there are a quintillion microorganisms. It is far likelier that the greater part of us will become protists than a skyscraping dormouse. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate. You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead. You will be drowned in oblivion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory. It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms, because they are the foundation of all forms. In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead. Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you. You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it. Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

I turn and I walk my tray to the conveyor and I drop it on the belt and I start to walk out of the Dining Hall. As I head through the Glass Corridor separating the men and women, I see Lilly sitting alone at a table. She looks up at me and she smiles and our eyes meet and I smile back. She looks down and I stop walking and I stare at her. She looks up and she smiles again. She is as beautiful a girl as I have ever seen. Her eyes, her lips, her teeth, her hair, her skin. The black circles beneath her eyes, the scars I can see on her wrists, the ridiculous clothes she wears that are ten sizes too big, the sense of sadness and pain she wears that is even bigger. I stand and I stare at her, just stare stare stare. Men walk past me and other women look at me and LIlly doesn’t understand what I’m doing or why I’m doing it and she’s blushing and it’s beautiful. I stand there and I stare. I stare because I know where I am going I’m not going to see any beauty. They don’t sell crack in Mansions or fancy Department Stores and you don’t go to luxury Hotels or Country Clubs to smoke it. Strong, cheap liquor isn’t served in five-star Restaurants or Champagne Bars and it isn’t sold in gourmet Groceries or boutique Liquor stores. I’m going to go to a horrible place in a horrible neighborhood run by horrible people providing product for the worst Society has to offer. There will be no beauty there, nothing even resembling beauty. There will be Dealers and Addicts and Criminals and Whores and Pimps and Killers and Slaves. There will be drugs and liquor and pipes and bottles and smoke and vomit and blood and human rot and human decay and human disintegration. I have spent much of my life in these places. When I leave here I will fond one of the and I will stay there until I die. Before I do, however, I want one last look at something beautiful. I want one last look so that I have something to hold in my mind while I’m dying, so that when I take my last breath I will be able to think of something that will make me smile, so that in the midst of the horror I can hold on to some shred of humanity.

This guy's testimony is awesome. I hate my testimony. I wish I was addicted to heroin. But no. I had to grow up in a somewhat functional family situation. It's just not fair. Why can't I be a crack addict who robbed Fort Knox using nothing but a can of hairspray and a plastic ice cream scoop? Thanks a lot, God.

trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What’s changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state’s white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

It seems old-age homes are teeming with junkies. They’re addicted to sleeping pills containing benzodiazepines. Huh? Yes, benzodiazepines. They also help assuage anxiety and fretting. But they come with a dangerous side effect: you might break a hip. In the Netherlands alone they’ve caused over a thousand broken hips, by the experts’ estimate—elderly folks who wake up in the middle of the night in an extra-doddering state, stagger to the bathroom and take a fall. Crack.

EIGHTH AMENDMENT The government shall not “crack down” on drug crime while taking kickbacks from industries and companies perpetuating addiction and abuse. You can’t fight wars on drugs—only on people. The drug war kills people, not drugs. Anytime you hear a politician talk about being tough on drugs but then say nothing about pharmaceutical companies, doctors, or insurance providers needing reform as well, you call them what they are: hacks. And hit them in the fa—we mean, vote against them.

She had landed the better odds, starting with the drug that ruled their respective childhoods. Chanels mother had chosen crack. Supreme's parents had fallen to heroin. Both habits could be catastrophic, but given the choice, crack was the better bet. A crack addict could learn to function between highs. Heroin left people flattened.

The cost savings weren’t what did the trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What’s changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state’s white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

Yes the fact was that, coincidentally or not, this change of heart was happening among conservatives just as opiate addiction was spreading among both rural and middle-class white kids across the country, though perhaps most notably in the deepest red counties and states. Drug enslavement and death, so close at hand, were touching the lives, and softening the hearts, of many Republican lawmakers and constituents. I’ll count this as a national moment of Christian forgiveness. But I also know that it was a forgiveness that many of these lawmakers didn’t warm to when urban crack users were the defendants. Let’s just say that firsthand exposure to opiate addiction can change a person’s mind about a lot of things. Many of their constituents were no longer so enamored with that “tough on crime” talk now that it was their kids who were involved. So a new euphemism emerged—“smart on crime”—to allow these politicians to support the kind of rehabilitation programs that many of them had used to attack others not so long ago.

She returned to numbness and despair. Life as it really was. A shrinking world of waiting terrors followed by nameless oblivion. The animate life of the Palms left her encumbered with the fact that she’d have to return to the crack house in the morning. Everything gnarled and black in her heart. Clara turned down seventh street. She heard the sounds of Joe snorting a bump of meth and the terrible rattling tick from deep in the car’s engine. She hoped for a message or warning in the tableau but was left wanting, as always.

There’s dancing, laughing, and Brooke, who cracks us up with her recount of the face shot heard round the world.

I grabbed at transparency like an addict grabs at a crack pipe.

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

Nothing is ‘wrong’ with me, Dan. What’s wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.

The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old, but more importantly, trodden upon.

What our culture lacks are honest messages about what it really means to be a healthy human being. Or how you make humans grow.

Sadly, what crack cocaine is to a drug addict, “repentance” has become to conservative Evangelical Christianity.

If a tiny boy, birthed from the poverty of the projects and a crack-addicted mother, can make it from a foster house to the White House, then the American Dream is real and achievable for everyone.

Veeva should count her blessings. Three years ago it was cocaine and a year ago it was crack and lemme tell you, that stuff you got to have. You do anything for that high." He laughed again, savoring his memories. "Where do you think the furniture went? Up my nose, that’s where. She finally had me carted out of here screaming like an insane man. Spent some time in Bellevue with little sparkly bugs coming out my orifices. Compared to that being a drunk is practically a sensible existence.

On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

Seattle. I’ve never seen a city so overrun with runaways, drug addicts, and bums. Pike Place Market: they’re everywhere. Pioneer Square: teeming with them. The flagship Nordstrom: have to step over them on your way in. The first Starbucks: one of them hogging the milk counter because he’s sprinkling free cinnamon on his head. Oh, and they all have pit bulls, many of them wearing handwritten signs with witticisms such as I BET YOU A DOLLAR YOU’LL READ THIS SIGN. Why does every beggar have a pit bull? Really, you don’t know? It’s because they’re badasses, and don’t you forget it. I was downtown early one morning and I noticed the streets were full of people pulling wheelie suitcases. And I thought, Wow, here’s a city full of go-getters. Then I realized, no, these are all homeless bums who have spent the night in doorways and are packing up before they get kicked out. Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit. Anytime you express consternation as to how the U.S. city with more millionaires per capita than any other would allow itself to be overtaken by bums, the same reply always comes back. “Seattle is a compassionate city.” A guy named the Tuba Man, a beloved institution who’d play his tuba at Mariners games, was brutally murdered by a street gang near the Gates Foundation. The response? Not to crack down on gangs or anything. That wouldn’t be compassionate. Instead, the people in the neighborhood redoubled their efforts to “get to the root of gang violence.” They arranged a “Race for the Root,” to raise money for this dunderheaded effort. Of course, the “Race for the Root” was a triathlon, because God forbid you should ask one of these athletic do-gooders to partake in only one sport per Sunday.

The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: “Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful Later she took her on personal development courses for children to give her the confidence and articulacy to flourish in any setting Big mistake Mum, Yazz said at fourteen when she was pitching to go to Reading Music Festival with her friends, it would be to the detriment of my juvenile development if you curtailed my activities at this critical stage in my journey towards becoming the independent-minded and fully self-expressed adult you expect me to be, I mean, do you really want me rebelling against your old-fashioned rules by running away from the safety of my home to live on the streets and having to resort to prostitution to survive and thereafter drug addiction, crime, anorexia and abusive relationships with exploitative bastards twice my age before my early demise in a crack house? Amma fretted the whole weekend her little girl way away

Stuff happens to most people. One thing going wrong, I mean. One family member missing a chance to help. One who cuts you off. One person with her own shit to deal with. One of those things isn't enough to send you falling through the cracks. But all of them together, they accumulate. An abandoned mother here. A missing uncle there. A disappearing father 2 generations back. A friendship broken by fear or mistrust or addiction. Genes that make you vulnerable to certain problems. Two children who aren't loved right meeting up when they're not really adults yet and having 2 more children who aren't loved right. It adds up. It all adds up.

In the late '80s and early '90s, the media used a few small studies of babies born of cocaine-addicted mothers to convince America that thousands of children were permanently damaged... It isn't true. It turns out there is no proof that crack babies do worse than anyone else. In fact, they do better, on average, than children born of alcoholic mothers... It wasn't until several years later that the myth started to unravel. Emory University psychologist Claire Coles had her graduate students spend hours observing 'crack babies' and normal babies. Her students did not see what Chasnoff had seen. In fact, they were unable to tell which children had been exposed to cocaine.

Well, a big part of it is how people addicted to crack were treated back in the day.” I sniff and start walking. “People acted like those addicts were soulless zombies, or jokes, or problems to lock away and take their babies from. Now white people get hooked on something, and we’re building fancy new facilities to research how to fix things.

There are now babies being born in our hospitals with crack or heroin habits, come on, fuck, no one would have dreamt such a horrible thing would happen to a newborn babies in Scotland. I didn’t think the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers of Scotland would have been messed up in such a nasty circle of misery, depression, violence, suicides and prisons because of drugs.

They think giving people longer prison sentences is going to teach people a lesson. Well that is just fantasy, as we just take our drugs and violence in to the prison. Our brothers and sisters, pals or rivals outside plug the gap that has been left by the dealer that was selling the crack or smack in the first place. Just like kamikazes, when one is dead, fifty queue up to take their place.

I went upstairs and tried to talk some sense into her but it was a waste of time. When she was high, she would babble about whatever came into her head. It was painful to watch and even worse to listen to. At one point Amy told me to cancel a proposed deal to license a perfume with her name attached to it. ‘I don’t want to hurt my credibility,’ she told me, as she sat there high on crack. ‘Hurt your credibility? What do you think smoking crack cocaine is doing to your credibility?’ It was an impossible conversation. I stormed out, with Amy shouting for me to come back. I felt as low as I’d ever been. I didn’t think Amy would die, but I just couldn’t see a way out of this. You don’t become an expert in anything overnight, and I was still learning how best to deal with an addict. Somehow or other I had to speed up the learning process.

At one point the worst thing to happen was the odd stabbing or slashing, the violence that we live with nowadays used to only be seen in Hollywood gangster movies such as Gangs of New York, Menace to Society and Boys and the Hood. Even when we were reading about the crack hitting London, no one in Scotland would have thought in their wildest dreams that it would have taken off in our cities, towns and now even highland villages.

In 15 years of working with teenage drug abusers, I’ve never found a single one who was what I’d call only a chemical addict. As powerful as many of the current market drugs are, especially cocaine and crack, I’ve never yet worked with an addict who didn’t have the inner emptiness. I’ve been in my personal recovery for 30 years and I’ve never met a person in recovery from chemical abuse who didn’t have abandonment issues in the sense I have defined them.

A crack rock-bottom is beneath rock-bottom. It’s a slab ceiling in every direction. A concrete box filled with guilt. During the chase you’re focused. The only thing that exists is the fix. Your mind is lost in the now, in the journey. Your life, everyone you’re hurting, everything you left behind, it all quiets down until you find this bottom, this moment of clarity. And when you find it the guilt is upon you. There’s nowhere to go. Not until the fix frees you.

A person can only have one love, Hen. People delude themselves into thinking that they can love many things, or many people, at once. It's all an illusion. A person only has the capacity to love- really love - one thing. Generally speaking, people love themselves but they play at having families and hobbies because that's what society tells us to do. Addicts and crooks are the only ones who are honest about it. Crackheads love crack. Gamblers love to gamble. They put those things above anyone and anything else in their lives. That's what love does.

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather VINDICTIVENESS. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.

Kyle says (with glee), “Addicted to breathing? I can fix that. Get on the rower and give me two thousand meters, all out, and vomit! Vomit your guts!—quick, down on the floor, forty push-ups, crack your spine!—quick! Quick! Bench two hundred pounds to muscle failure—die slowly!—burst your clotted chest!—give me one hundred squats in one hundred seconds—no resting, Conte!—pull that five-hundred-pound sled back and forth the length of the floor and stop making those noises! Did I see you eye-fuck the clock? Would you like the Suicide Stairs? Hurry! Hurry! Slam that thirty-pound medicine ball, not on the floor but through it, twenty times, penetrate that floor, Conte, rape it hard and explode your evil heart and balls.

A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well. Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

ghost. No way am I gonna get bullied by anyone or anything—especially ghosts. “Mattie, you okay?” Mrs. Olson is eyeballing me with concern. I haven’t moved to get out of the car. “All good, Mrs. O,” I smile weakly at her. “Just tired.” Taking a deep breath, I open the door and force myself out. I am not afraid, I chant over and over. The other kids are still at school, so the house is pretty empty. Mrs. O had told me earlier we had a new foster kid in the house, but I’m betting he’s at school too. She sends me upstairs with the promise to bring me a sandwich and a glass of milk. The doctors said no caffeine for a while, so my favorite drink in the world, Coke, is off limits. At least until I can escape and get to a gas station. I need it like an addict needs crack. My room is exactly as I left it, the bed turned down and my clothes thrown into a corner. A simple white dresser and mirror, desk, and a twin bed covered in my worn out quilt decorate the room.

Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the “superpredator” “crack babies” to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort “Save Our Children.” The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them.

So just take a look at the different prosecution rates and sentencing rules for ghetto drugs like crack and suburban drugs like cocaine, or for drunk drivers and drug users, or just between blacks and whites in general―the statistics are clear: this is a war on the poor and minorities. Or ask yourself a simple question: how come marijuana is illegal but tobacco legal? It can't be because of the health impact, because that's exactly the other way around―there has never been a fatality from marijuana use among million reported users in the United States, whereas tobacco kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. My strong suspicion, though I don't know how to prove it, is that the reason is that marijuana's a weed, you can grow it in your backyard, so there's nobody who would make any money off it if it were legal. Tobacco requires extensive capital inputs and technology, and it can be monopolized, so there are people who can make a ton of money off it. I don't really see any other difference between the two of them, frankly―except that tobacco's far more lethal and far more addictive.

By the way, let me shatter a myth about addiction. This whole idea that drugs are addictive... they're not in themselves addictive. Studies have shown that a large number of people can be given opiates for pain and they don't become addicted. No drug, no substance in itself is addictive. Most people who try most substances, even repeatedly, and never become addicted to it. So you can talk about this "highly addictive drugs" like crack and crystal meth and all that. The vast majority of the people who try them never become addicted. So when we ask the question, "is alcohol addictive, yes or no", you know what the answer is? Yes or no. That's what the answer is. If you ask "is shopping addictive, yes or no", the answer is yes or no. Is food addictive, yes or no, is sexual acting out addictive, yes or no, the answer is yes or no. What we have to look at are the susceptabilities. What makes people prone to be addicted. Because the substance itself doesn't explain it. And therefore to put the emphasis on simply trying to stop the flow of drugs, as if that ever made any difference whatsoever, it is by definition to waste a lot of resources and to create a lot of unnecessary pain. That's not where the answer is.

Our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others…is all the more pronounced the more distant these experiences are from ours in time, space, or quality,” wrote the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. We can be moved by the tragedy of mass starvation on a far continent; after all, we have all known physical hunger, if only temporarily. But it takes a greater effort of emotional imagination to empathize with the addict. We readily feel for a suffering child, but cannot see the child in the adult who, his soul fragmented and isolated, hustles for survival a few blocks away from where we shop or work. Levi quotes Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian philosopher and resistance fighter who fell into the grasp of the Gestapo. “Anyone who was tortured remains tortured… Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world…Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.” Améry was a full-grown adult when he was traumatized, an accomplished intellectual captured by the foe in the course of a war of liberation. We may then imagine the shock, loss of faith and unfathomable despair of the child who is traumatized not by hated enemies but by loved ones.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . . on you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing--castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of teh mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting--"passengers will now reclaim their seats" and much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight...as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity--but there is meanwhile this trip to be on ... over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: "Once, only once..." One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have taken the Serpent to mean.

David Chang, who had become the darling of the New York restaurant world, thanks to his Momofuku noodle and ssäm bars in the East Village, opened his third outpost, Momofuku Milk Bar, just around the corner from my apartment. While everyone in the city was clamoring for the restaurants' bowls of brisket ramen and platters of pig butt, his pastry chef, Christina Tosi, was cooking up "crack pie," an insane and outrageous addictive concoction made largely of white sugar, brown sugar, and powdered sugar, with egg yolks, heavy cream, and lots of butter, all baked in an oat cookie crust. People were going nuts for the stuff, and it was time for me to give this crack pie a shot. But as soon as I walked into the industrial-style bakery, I knew crack could have nothing on the cookies. Blueberry and cream. Double chocolate. Peanut butter. Corn. (Yes, a corn cookie, and it was delicious). There was a giant compost cookie, chock-full of pretzels, chips, coffee grounds, butterscotch, oats, and chocolate chips. But the real knockout was the cornflake, marshmallow, and chocolate chip cookie. It was sticky, chewy, and crunchy at once, sweet and chocolaty, the ever-important bottom side rimmed in caramelized beauty. I love rice crisps in my chocolate, but who would have thought that cornflakes in my cookies could also cause such rapture?

Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS. We recognize that people will continue to have sex for nonreproductive reasons despite the laws and mores. Therefore, we try to make sexual practices as safe as possible in order to minimize the spread of the AIDS viruses. In a similar way, we continually try to make our drinking water, foods, and even our pharmaceutical medicines safer. The ubiquity of chemical intoxicants in our lives is undeniable evidence of the continuing universal need for safer medicines with such applications. While use may not always be for an approved medical purpose, or prudent, or even legal, it is fulfilling the relentless drive we all have to change the way we feel, to alter our behavior and consciousness, and, yes, to intoxicate ourselves. We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition. Then we must make them as safe and risk free and as healthy as possible. Dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death. Imagine an alcohol-type substance that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, impaired driving, or workplace problems. Would you care to inhale a perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air? How would you like a pain-killer as effective as morphine but safer than aspirin, a mood enhancer that dissolves on your tongue and is more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine, a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more relaxing than a martini, or a safe sleeping pill that allows you to choose to dream or not? Perhaps you would like to munch on a user friendly hallucinogen that is as brief and benign as a good movie? This is not science fiction. As described in the following pages, there are such intoxicants available right now that are far safer than the ones we currently use. If smokers can switch from tobacco cigarettes to nicotine gum, why can’t crack users chew a cocaine gum that has already been tested on animals and found to be relatively safe? Even safer substances may be just around the corner. But we must begin by recognizing that there is a legitimate place in our society for intoxication. Then we must join together in building new, perfectly safe intoxicants for a world that will be ready to discard the old ones like the junk they really are. This book is your guide to that future. It is a field guide to that silent spring of intoxicants and all the animals and peoples who have sipped its waters. We can no more stop the flow than we can prevent ourselves from drinking. But, by cleaning up the waters we can leave the morass that has been the endless war on drugs and step onto the shores of a healthy tomorrow. Use this book to find the way.

I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

Cassie,” I growl at the young brunette. “How’s the sobriety?” Alex brought the submissive to us. She’s an addict that he councils at Transcend. I don’t want to be mean to her right now, especially since my best friend brought her here, but I’m furious and she’s an outlet. She can’t strike back. “Ninety days sober,” she says with pride. “That’s awesome,” I say enthusiastically and smile at her. “I love how we have to give fuck ups a medal when they behave. I would think it should go to those who never fuck up. What’s the incentive to behave if all you have to do is get shit-faced and steal shit for years and then ninety days on the straight-and-narrow we have to pat you on the back for being a good girl,” I say in a saccharine voice. She gazes at me with huge, glassy brown eyes. I can see the tears forming. Cassie worries her full bottom lip between her teeth and tries not to blink. “But hey, what do I know. It just seems like the system is flawed. The good little boys and girls just don’t get the recognition that a crack-whore thief gets,” I shrug. Cassie blinks and the surface of her tears breaks and they finally slide down her cheeks in shame. “But go you!” I shout sarcastically. I give her a thumbs up and walk down the hall. “Cold… that was just cold, dude,” Alex chuckles at me. That was so bad that I have to laugh or I’d puke. I shake my head as my belly contracts from laughter. “Score on my newest asshattery?” I ask my partner in crime. If I didn’t have him I’d scream. I’ll owe Master Marcus forever. He stripped me bare until Font was naked in the impact room at Brownstone I trained in. Alex walked in and shook my hand- instant best friend. “Ah…” He taps his chin in thought and the bastard tucks his black hair behind his ear. I growl at him because he did it on purpose. He knows how much I miss the feel of my hair swinging at my jawline. Alex arches a perfect brow above his aqua eye and smirks. He runs his hands through his hair and groans in pleasure. “8.5. It was a decent attempt, but you pulled your hit. You’re too soft. I bet you were scared you’d make her relapse.” “Yeah,” I say bashfully. “Not happening, bud. I’m just that fucking good. I better go do some damage control. Don’t hurt any more subs. Pick on the big bastards. They may bite back, but their egos are delicate.

I don't have social media" "Oh right." He rolls his eyes. "Too good for all that." She shakes her head. "Not at all. On the contrary, I'm too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It's designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody's loneliness and promises us a community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that - weaponizing a person's isolation - it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody's like 'words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people,' blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody's influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they're lovable. And then, once you're nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people's triumphs, that's when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don't get m e started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that's just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don't need it. Any of it." Blandine cracks her neck. "I'm corrupt enough.

If YOUR free READ it calmly. This to all my FOLKS and MYSELF our expectations, our needs, our dreams, our destiny, our life style, Our likes and dislikes. we always RUN around so many things without even THINKING. Have a look on our SATISFACTION list # new gadget or a mobile for example fun for 2 months? # New bike fun for "2 months" . # New car for "3"? # Getting into a relationship wantedly as we are alone max 3/4 months? # Revenge ? A weak? Month? # flirting ? 2/3 months # sex ? Few mins # boozing, joint or a fag? Few hours? # addicting to something leaving behind everything? One year? # your example of anything repeatedly done for satisfaction? Max? Get a number yourself! ¦¦¦ Even though we satisfy our soul by all the above. Passing day by day. Years passed. Yet left with the same IRRITATING feeling to satisfy our needs. ONE after ANOTHER . ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ Some day we realize it was " pure SELFISH satisfaction " and left with a "GUILT " and EMPTINESS . questioning LIFE ! ¦¦¦ "In the RAMPAGE of getting everything we wished. We might not realize what we MISSED . Being CARELESS of our surrounding." "Feelings left hurt and hearts broken. Family friends and people we cares and who cares us. PRIORITIES made by ourself to be satisfied even here." If LIFE was just to satisfy what ever we WISHED for. Was it A life worth lived? May be! Yes. But it's SURE you end up questioning life with BLACKNESS ! # So many questions unanswered. Our EXISTENCE ? Our DESTINY ? To question the existence of God and HEAVEN .? At Last questioning the existence of UNIVERSE itself? The whole system CRACKS a nerve! Why spoil our LIFE when we are the creators of our LIFE ! When we are capable of finding an answer to does questions by our self Finding that true meaning of LIFE beyond all the mess we live by daily. which is Going to satisfy us. We need to realize by now our Every action should lead to Happiness and satisfaction of the people around us. It's the real paradise feeling we all wish for. The real deal. We disrupt our LIFE in the rampage of getting everything we need which can automatically be provided by LIFE . When we start sacrificing our LIFE in a positive way being busy fulfilling the needs of our dears ones. They indeed be busy trying to fulfill our needs and wishes. It's giving some things and getting something back. With less expectations. Rather than grabbing. A SECRET for a PERFECT LIFE which we FAIL to live by. Starting from FORGIVING everyone who tumbles in our path trying to steal away our positive life and happiness. Because as we all are tamed to do MISTAKE at some point. There is not much TIME left to waste by hating and cursing LIFE when we can start LIVING right now. "A REMINDER just to make sure we try to be SELFLESS and find that UNMATCHED HAPPINESS and SATISFACTION ." ~~¦¦ LIFE is complex to understand yet so SIMPLE ¦¦ ¶¶ Never be in a hurry on GETTING on to something you might be left with NOTHING ¶¶ << Being SELFISH makes us a HEALTHY human but being SELFLESS makes you A HUMAN >> «« LIFE is meaningful when we forget about our THIRST and QUENCH the thirst of OTHERS .»» RETHINK AND REDEFINE LIFE ¶¶ ~ Sharath kumar G .

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!

Her mother wasn’t able to do much because she was victim, a statistic. At least that’s what her grandmother said about people addicted to crack.

This severely crew-cutted, Mr Rambo, Die-Hard Terminator type, wore neither helmet nor goggles. He was also shirtless under his black, armoured vest and had two belts of oversized bullets slung over his shoulders and crossing at his chest. He obviously being one of a mind that size was indeed important, looking the butch business as he cradled an almightily impressive BFG in his bared, muscle-bound arms. The outer edge of the right one’s bicep having three stripes tattooed upon in… No, honestly. The huge weapon he held looked as if it’d been specifically designed for bringing down either crack addicted bull elephants, smack riddled rhinos in dire need, or heroin dependant hippos desperate for a fix.

One can only keep this type of life up for so long without cracking all over, like a broken car window, as you are still clinging to some adherence of your old shape, but you are shattered just the same.

Oh Nan,” I muttered, “you’re so parochial.” But it turns out my dear ol’ nan was right. My nan’s “Kilroy drugs ladder” led inexorably from marijuana to amphetamines, to LSD to ecstasy to cocaine and then crack to—cue fanfare—heroin: the drug addict’s jackpot.

They all told me I had a fear of intimacy, but I vehemently disagreed; I craved intimacy like a crack addict.

In the absence of jobs, the drug trade flourished. "A lot of people around here got caught up," said Harlee, noting that his addiction to crack cost him his family and a series of good jobs - as a corrections officer, a firearms instructor and a long-haul truck driver. Harlee went to prison for five years for slamming his truck into a car and killing the driver after an all-night crack binge. "Those drugs have everything to

Keep in mind that sugar is powerfully addictive.7 I put sugar in the same category as addictive drugs like crack or heroin. Take Oreos, for example. One study from Connecticut showed that rats fed the iconic cookie liked it as much as cocaine and morphine.8 When the rats ate Oreo cookies, the pleasure center of their brains, the nucleus accumbens, lit up like a Christmas tree—the same area in the brain that lights up with cocaine. Sugar and cocaine both stimulate the addictive part of the brain with a neurotransmitter called dopamine, known for its role in pleasure and satisfaction. Rats in the study even broke open the cookie to eat the sugary middle first. Still not sure if you’re addicted to sugar?

You and Dad are really the wrecking ball of all of our teenage runaway fantasies. Why couldn't you jerks go and be crack addicts or religious fanatics so we could have excuses to live on the wide open road? - email from Lily