Self-Medication Quotes

When the pain is great enough, we will let anyone be doctor.

I've never taken drugs. My drug, I suppose, is drink. I never drink before I sing, but I do make up for it when I come off!

You have problems, you think drink helps, then you have two problems.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.

I've had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.

I drink to make other people interesting.

I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk.

Many times drugs and alcohol - there's a technical term that they're called, emotional suppressants - are the only things that can help a person survive and get through and be able to deal with their pain.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams had six sons. Two of these were great statesman and four were drunks. For the Adams family it was the White House or the Ale House …. Family pressure is part of what drives people to drink.

I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.

I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering.

Your Committee desires to place on record its firm conviction that any method of treatment for narcotic drug addiction, whether private, institutional, official, or governmental, which permits the addicted person to dose himself with the habit-forming narcotic drugs placed in his hands for self-administration, is an unsatisfactory treatment of addiction, begets deception, extends the abuse of habit-forming narcotic drugs, and causes an increase in crime.

My life was a complete catatrophe. I was very, very sick from drugs and alcohol.

Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

Thank God I never hooked on anything. I never had a monkey on my back. I just wanted to self-medicate, to numb myself through liquor. It's how I dealt with life, reality, stress, change, sadness, memories. The list goes on. I was really trying to feel nothing.

Andrew Wood's death changed things for a few weeks. I probably got even heavier into drugs after that.

If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish.

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

Sid said that drugs weren't the problem, life was the problem. Drugs were the solution.

I drink to stay warm, and to kill selected memories

Vodka does not ease back pain. But it does get your mind off it.

We have witnessed the terrible increases in the incidence of alcoholism, the advent of drug dependency, the protests, marches, strikes and human alienation.

Avoid using cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs as alternatives to being an interesting person.

My manager said, "Don't use liquor as a crutch!" I can't use liquor as a crutch, because a crutch helps me walk.