How Does Drug Addiction Affect Friendship

If there is anything that tests friendship more than drug and alcohol addiction, I have yet to find it.

Whether you’re a drug abuser and your friends are not, or you and your friends are all drug abusers, friendships become tangled up and often don’t stand the tests of time. Drugs change the innate personalities of people, alter perception, mess up priorities and make things generally risky and unhealthy.

There have been many situations where sober friends can’t get their drug-using friend to stop, and so the relationship ends. I personally have seen relationships where friends use together and the friendship is detrimental to the physical and mental health of both parties. Having been a friend to a drug abuser (while I was sober), I was unable to understand why he couldn’t just stop. He was unable to consider a life without drugs—and though at the time this hurt me, I now see it was not him but his “drug personality” that began to rule his life and make these decisions for him.

How does drug addiction affect friendship? Negatively. If you want to be a good friend, to yourself and to others, know when to draw a line. Use the resources of family and treatment specialists to help those around you (and yourself) keep things from spiraling out of control. There is a large difference between helping and supporting and just flat-out enabling.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you notice you use drugs uncontrollably around a particular group of friends, you have to know when it’s time to cut ties with those people—for your own sake, and for theirs. You never know; your quitting and getting sober could be the catalyst that drives others to seek help and get clean as well.

For more information on getting a friend or loved one into a treatment facility contact Vista Bay at 800-556-8885.