I’m sure you’re right. Caring for people, the way you do, you have a bird’s eye perspective. My own view, from a lower and therefore more maze-like standpoint, essentially backs up what you’re saying. For me though, and for people in the same position as me, who’ve had to write off people that’ve become junkies, the exceedingly remote possibility of some miraculous recovery has vanished.

As callous as that is, and as statistically wrong as it must be — as pejorative as the term ‘junkie’ must sound — cutting ties is a self-preservation skill that often does not come easily. A very different outlook than your better, more compassionate, more fundamentally sound view.

I can make out a bright glimmer of truth in what you’ve said about the key pathway to addiction being self-medication. With the people I’ve known, as far as I know, the root cause seems to’ve been self-medicating for untreated psychological disorders. Vicious family cycles of abuse, too. Like you say, the income prospects for your average junkie sneak thief with, say, late-onset schizophrenia, are not great. The better they’re doing, the more worrisome that is.

Like any other rat in the maze, my view toward junkies is probably common, even though I didn’t have to cut off several close family members the way others have. Unable and unwilling to keep company with junkies, having run out of alternate approaches and well out past the first few ultimata, it began to seem to me that it wasn’t so much that I was abandoning anyone to their fate. Rather, it seemed as though they face their own judgement. Not their judgement in the sense that they make their own decisions. Judgement in the sense that their choices make their consequences. It wouldn’t be me passing judgement. It would be entirely of their own making, nothing at all to do with me. Which was, to my mind at the time, likely to be as stern for the addictors as the addicted.

In my own particular Tennessee Williams drama, the primary addictor was the youngest in a chain of those. A family line of addictors, that reached back through generations of, of all things, doctors and nurses. Got the impression that a surprisingly high number of the functional junkies in the world keep themselves that way by hiding in the medical profession. Yet another facet of self-medication, then. And vicious family cycles.