[phil248]

Using drugs to treat a physical addiction is first and foremost a "coping mechanism" for treating the physical addiction.

When a serious alcoholic is puking themselves nearly to death as they try and get sober, they aren't trying to escape some childhood trauma or "stress". They are trying to escape a physical addiction that has already dramatically altered their mind and body and may possibly kill them.

You may be confusing the cause of drug use with the consequences of repeatedly using addictive drugs. Eventually, the drug addiction replaces all other problems. It's not a representation of other problems.

[crunchyfrog]

If withdrawal symptoms were really the main reason addicts continued to use drugs then relapses would be rare. I recommend reading about the Rat Park experiments:

> In another experiment, he forced rats in ordinary lab cages to consume the morphine-laced solution for 57 days without other liquid available to drink. When they moved into Rat Park, they were allowed to choose between the morphine solution and plain water. They drank the plain water. He writes that they did show some signs of dependence. There were "some minor withdrawal signs, twitching, what have you, but there were none of the mythic seizures and sweats you so often hear about ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Also, before you argue that humans are different than rats, the same thing was observed with soldiers in Vietnam. Many were addicted while they served but when they returned to the US, the large majority quit and very few relapsed.

[phil248]

I don't know what to tell you man. Quitting alcohol cold turkey can kill a person. Go get to know some people struggling with addiction to maybe broaden your perspective beyond some study you read? And keep in mind that different people suffer from addictions in many different ways. For substances like alcohol and cocaine, there are well known genetic differences that predispose people to those addictions.