Dr. Keith Humphreys

my marriage has disintegrated and I'm miserable and my spouse and I hate each other and this is the one moment where I am above that or unconcerned about that, that oftentimes there's something awful, that frightening or humiliating or painful that this is the escape from.

And they do provide that, at least in the short term, the high-term costs are hard, but in the short term, everything could be falling down around you and if you're high on the stimulant, you can still feel euphoria, at least for that brief moment.

And what can be tough about recovery is when you stop using, those things are not gone.

You're still going to die.

If your marriage is bad, your marriage is bad.

If you were abused, you were still abused.

And that is enough to persuade some people never to stop because it's a lot harder to actually deal with those things head on than avoiding them through intoxication.

Men are larger consumers of addictive substances in every culture on earth and are overrepresented in all the major addictions, you know, opioids probably four men to every one woman, alcohol probably about 60, 40, you know, used to be higher but women have been drinking more.

The one thing you see in clinics that is close, the one is prescription medication, that those are a little closer to 50-50.

But otherwise, it's predominantly male.

No, I don't think so.

I think it's just you end up...

in these situations that are possible to cover over without lying.

So, you know, where, you know, you were supposed to, dad, you were supposed to pick me up after school, where were you?

I was drunk, right?

But I don't want to say that.

So I say, oh, you know, the car, I had car trouble, you know, I couldn't do it.

Or, you know, the boss, what happened to the, you know, money for the, oh, yeah, it was an unexpected tax bill because I'm not going to say I stole it.

And so I think that is why.

The other thing, of course, is sometimes we make addicted people lie.