Addiction is not something I learned about from a distance.

I have experienced it in many forms:
Attention
Food
Cannabis
Alcohol
Hard drugs
Sex
Gambling.

Some helped me escape for an evening.
Some helped me escape for much longer.

At one point, cannabis helped quiet suicidal thoughts that I did not yet know how to deal with in another way.
That does not make cannabis the answer.

But it changed the question I would eventually begin asking about addiction.

What if the addiction is not the whole problem?
What if, sometimes, it is also an attempted solution?

A way of escaping an experience, emotion, memory or internal state for which someone does not yet have another way to cope.
That perspective profoundly changed how I began looking at addictive behaviour.

Instead of only asking:
How do we stop this?

I became interested in another question:
What is this doing for you that, right now, nothing else seems able to do?

That doesn’t remove responsibility.
It doesn’t make destructive behaviour harmless.

But it changes the person standing in front of me from a problem that needs to be fixed into a human being whose behaviour might make more sense when we understand what lies beneath it.

And sometimes that is where movement can begin.