This is a serious topic that I won’t go down the usual road with. What you usually see online when it comes to this subject is people talking about the seriousness of addiction and the worst-case scenario of what happens to addicts who don’t get treatment. You know what I’m talking about: we’re told of people who start on a gateway drug, fall into an addiction, and before they know what hit them, they’ve lost their job. Then they lose their family, lose their homes and end up on the streets. Well, I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I’m going to talk about the best case scenario for getting treatment.

Before I get started, let me assure you that I’m not speaking as someone who’s never seen what addiction is like. I have not personally been an addict, but a close family member of mine is. This person, we’ll call him Brian (not his real name), began suffering from drug addiction pretty early in life, which is not at all an unusual occurrence.

It started with meeting up with other kids in the woods and getting high. That eventually progressed to hanging out with friends when he wasn’t working as a pizza delivery boy. Why pizza delivery? He had dropped out of high school, because drugs were more important, so he didn’t have many choices for jobs. Over, the decades we as a family did our best to address these issues, but you’ve got to want help, and Brian didn’t. He never lost his family, and he never lost his friends, but successive visits to a rehab center did nothing for him, as again, he didn’t believe he needed help.

This pattern of behavior went on for decades. Soon Brian found himself graduating from pizza delivery, to janitorial work, and then to warehouse work. The drugs were still on that table in his basement, but their numbers began to increase. Ever so gradually the quantity of drugs Brian was taking increased as well. Then, one day, he found himself unable to work.

By this time, he had reached the age of fifty, and he was too high to do his job anymore. This resulted in Brian going off and on disability for various invented reasons, but his employers eventually caught on to what was going on. The result? He was told to go home and not return until he was clean and sober. This was something that Brian didn’t want to do, because his family and his disability benefits were giving him money to sit at home and get high.

So, you might be asking yourself, what motivated Brian to finally seek help? It was really a series of events that happened after he left his job: First, his car broke down and this time it broke down for good. Why not get a new one, you ask? Because he didn’t have the money for another vehicle.

Drugs are expensive, and left him with nothing in his wallet. Second, in the middle of the night, his house caught fire and he almost burned with it. Insurance took care of repairs, but the fact that Brian was so high that he didn’t get up from the couch when his living room was on fire, scared him more than a little bit!

Next, he started having problems breathing and getting around. Family members started calling him “Old Man Brian” behind his back, despite not being of an advanced age. The drugs had taken their toll by now. He looked like a seventy-year-old and his doctor was telling him that he would need to breathe with an oxygen tank soon.

That was what finally had Brian enter himself into a program: it was the realization that he was actually mortal, after all. It was a funny thing for him to realize, as he didn’t ever have to worry about money, thanks to parents that were more than happy to enable him and his addiction. He also knew that the rest of his family would always love him, no matter what.

Even his employers wouldn’t fire him, because having an addiction actually gave him a support mechanism at his work. All in all, everyone stood beside him, and Brian never felt the need to quit.

What really woke him up was the fact that a doctor has to tell you the truth, and the truth was that Brian’s body was on the verge of quitting on him altogether. It was the one thing that he couldn’t lie to, couldn’t cheat, couldn’t make up an excuse on why to stop taking drugs. That was why Brian finally got help, and why he wished he done so much sooner.

You know what? Maybe this isn’t the best case scenario for drug addiction, after all. If you have a drug addiction, seek help now. Don’t wait. Believe me, you’ll be happy you did.

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