by Gail M Feldman

Created on: November 03, 2010   Last Updated: November 08, 2010

If you want to help your friend overcome drug addiction the first thing you need to do, as cold-hearted a consideration as this may seem, is determine whether the friend in question really is a friend.  You are about to invest your time, your emotional well-being and perhaps some funds as well into an endeavor that may or may not succeed, and you'll have to watch your friend go through hell, and be dragged through it yourself, for an unspecified period of time.  Loyalty is no small thing, but many a well-meaning person has thrown good tears after bad and sacrificed his or her sanity for an uncaring, unwilling unfriend.

However, if you really love your friend, then you had better be prepared for the long haul.  You will be lied to, yelled at, perhaps stolen from, definitely abused in some way or another, and experience exasperation, despair, anger, and likely grief.  Are you ready?

You can't change your friend and you can't make him or her want to change.  What you can do is support change, encourage change, point out that there is no alternative but to change, be ignored, continue to do all that and hope against hope that your actions and words will coincide with the a-ha moment for which you keep waiting:  that tiny window of opportunity, that tiny sliver of clarity, during which your friend agrees not only that s/he is racing deathward and dragging others with him or her, and must stop, but that it is possible to stop.  That is the moment you must get one fact through before the window closes, before the sliver melts:  that you are there to help, that help can help, and that your friend can be helped.

What not to do:

1.  Do not support your friend financially.  You will be supporting his or her addiction.  No matter what your friend's situation is, be it homelessness, hunger or debt to the biggest knee-breaker in town, whatever you give him or her will go into an arm or a nostril, not toward rent, food or knee-safety.

2.  Do not chastise or preach at your friend for being an addict.  S/he already knows it sucks.

3.  Do not suggest religion as a cure unless your friend is already religious.  Even if your friend IS religious, this is dangerous ground to tread because addiction is physical as well as mental; the idea of giving up control over things that are beyond one's purview (such as what other people do, whom other people love, the weather) is good, giving up control over things

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