By “some” people, I’m referring to myself as the fully-recovered. In high school I wasn’t interested in drugs, and only had alcohol a few times over friend’s houses, and to be honest, being 13 and drunk on whatever was laying around and trying to hide it from your parents when you get home is no fun. Literally only happened like twice before I turned 18. In college, I went the other way. I actually wound up in the hospital from alcohol poisoning my first semester of college. 1.75 liters of Vodka. The doctor at the time said I shouldn’t be alive. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that, all the barfing, or the guy next to me, also strapped down saying, “Nurse, can I get a glass of water?” all night. My BAC was .8 Yeah, no zero next to that: point eight. Anyway, it was a few months before I could drink again, and 30+ years later the smell of Vodka still makes me sick. A few years later, around 94, my friends were determined to get me to try weed, but I was never interested. Till a friend of mine that had been away a few months came back. I finally said yes. Once I did that, I was like, “May as well try it all”. Next was LSD, and shrooms, weed with crystal on it, Special K, Ecstasy, Opium, Coke, and pretty much every pill anyone ever passed to me. I did it all. Except needles. I never got hooked, until a guy a roommate and I knew came over with a bundle of rocks. A bundle then was like 30 or so. What started out as a fun night wound up being a $30,000 a month habit for several months where we stole everything we could get out hands on, ultimately leading to my winding up incarcerated for two years for larceny. The roommate I had at the time never got in trouble for that, but his life spiraled and he killed himself in 2013. I didn’t even know, I had stopped talking to him in 2011 after he said something rude about a girl I was dating. I felt terrible when I heard the news, I’m pretty sure I could’ve helped him. I have to live with that. On the fully-recovered part: crack was all I thought about for years. To this very day I still remember the sweet smell and the rush and euphoria from using it. I liked Opium, but I loved crack. Strangely, the soap Lever 2000 smells like Crack to me so I avoid using that soap. It has been 28 years since I touched Cocaine in any form. It just scares me that much. And for court at the time I had to do NA or AA, and while “inside” , of course. I just never felt like what they were saying applied to me. I was addicted to one thing, not everything. Like if you’re hooked on donuts, do you give up pizza? Over the years after I got out in 97, I still had run-ins with the law, I still abused drugs and alcohol, but it eventually got old. I started caring about showing up at work sober and not having to deal with hangovers, I didn’t want to have to deal with getting sick, scoring, or the people associated with any of it. Bars became an empty experience for me: I was just done. It’s now 2022, almost 2023, and I’ve been married for 9 years—No kids yet, although at my age I feel like I missed out, and my 35 year old wife does want them. I still drink, but very rarely. And I have expensive taste now like Macallan 18 for liquor. Too expensive to drink like a kid. I quit smoking cigarettes 3 years ago thanks to my wife constantly bugging me about it. I haven’t smoked weed in like 15 years, and the only time I take any pills now is if they’re prescribed. And I prefer not to. I’ve had my dentist give me Percocet a few times when I had dental work done and I just tossed it in the medicine cabinet. If I needed something I opted for Naproxen. I used to have a friend who was in AA, still is as far as I know, but we’d hang out at a local coffee shop and his AA friends would always assume I’m in AA, and then ask why if I wasn’t I was at a coffee house. It would make my friend laugh, and he’d tell them, “See, that thinking is why you are in AA and he isn’t.” I think AA is good for most of the people in it, but I don’t think everyone is always an addict. I think some people, like myself, were an addict, but time healed us.