2. Experience of a useful effect of the drug over time. People with the worst relationships with drugs often use them very heavily but get the least out of them.

3. Ease of separation from use of the drug. One of the striking features of a bad relationship with a drug is dependence with it controlling the person more that the person controls the drug.

4. Freedom form adverse effects on health or behavior. Using drugs in ways that produce adverse effects on health and behavior and continuing their use in spite of these effects is the defining characteristic of drug abuse.

Whether a drug is legal or illegal, approved or disapproved, obtained from a physician or bought on the black market, if the user is aware of its nature, can maintain a useful effect from it over time, can easily separate from it and can remain free from adverse effects, that is a good relationship with the drug. Bad relationships with drugs begin with loss of the desired effect with increasing frequency of use, and progress to difficulty in leaving the drug

alone, with eventual impairment of health or social functioning. There are no good or bad drugs; there are only good and bad relationships with drugs. These relationships create the nature of our addictions.

ReconsiDer Member Gene Tinelli, an addictions psychiatrist, may be reached at (315) 476-3606, or by e-mail at genet43@dreamscape.com.

The sources for Gene’s article are:

Darryl S. Inaba, William E. Cohen & Michael E. Holstein, Uppers, Downers, All Arounders: Physical & Mental Effects of Psychoactive Drugs (3rd edition). CNS Publications, 1997; William R Miller & Stephen Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People to Change Addictive Behavior. Guilford Press, 1991; Stanton Peele & Archie Brodsky, The Truth about Addiction and Recovery. Simon & Schuster, 1991; James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross & Carlo C. DiClemente, Changing for Good: A revolutionary Six-Stage program for Overcoming Bad Habit s and Moving Your Life Positively Forward, Avon Books, 1994; Andrew Weil & Winifred Rosen, Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Wanted to Know about Mind-active drugs (2nd edition). Houghton-Mifflin, 1993.