What responsibility do you have to help an addict in your family?

Empathy, not sympathy. Trust them to make the right choice. Encourage the right frameworks, friends, influences, choices. Love them. Offer refuge.

I have very mixed emotions about addicts. Although, I believe they are sick and like all illness, we need to show a level of understanding and compassion. But having dealt with addiction in my family, you have to get to a point to where you aren't enabling bad habits and addictive behavior. So as far as responsibility goes, I feel addicts need to be held accountable for their own actions, and the best thing we can do is to stop enabling. Tough love is hard love.

I think that a family member with a drug problem is like a family member with ANY problem - of course the bosom of the family is the first place that a loved and cherished person would turn to for support and assistance in dealing with ANY medical or health problem. That being said, a family alone is not strong enough to "cure" addiction, and too often, good families get dragged down into the disease of addiction and end up enabling the addict in a misguided attempt to "help" the addict by protecting them from the natural consequences of their choice (and I do believe it is a choice) to abuse drugs. I say the family should give it a shot, but if the addict is hell-bent on self-destruction, then it may be a better use of time and talent to stage an intervention and let addiction professionals handle the process by which the addict either chooses to get well or chooses to suffer the consequences of their addiction free from the enablements of their family. You have to be willing to love someone enough to force them to confront their own demons.

Family members have no "responsibility" to help an addict in the family. Done. What I wanna know is why Vanguard and Current do all these "Reefer Madness" genre dox. It's ridiculous, the DEA and ONDCP put out more balanced stuff. Is Bill Bennett a majority stockholder? Is Calvina Fay the Programming chief? Vanguard's drug shows are blatant pro-Drug War, Inc. propaganda.

You need to get educated...get to Alanon, Narconon
AA, NA, and meet and talk to addicts and their families. Ask them to help you. Research rehabs that take your insurance, or are free (ie Greymoor or BRC) Don't give them extra keys to anything, don't feed em.. If you are housing/feeding them, they will use their money for drugs..you are killing them.

I don't have an addict family member, but if I have one, he/she will SURELY quit.

Having come from a family of varying addicts, I believe there's a fine line you walk once you're involved. There's a lot of heartbreak and disappointment. I've learned to hope for a lot and not expect too much. I try to offer endless love and no physical resources unless it's for a rehab effort. And yes, when a person has shown no inclination to beat their own addiction and heal themselves, I have walked away. In most cases I've seen, there's a bottom-out point that even an addict can't ignore. Sometimes there are a dozen of them, and they come in waves.

It's different for every addict. It's different for every family, for every friend, for every person in the periphery. Unfortunately some addicts won't let themselves be saved, and they even lose the last shred of survival instinct they once had to save themselves. That's the hardest reality to accept, especially when you see the self-destruction of a person you love but no longer recognize in the midst of their addiction. It's something I wrestle with still, after decades of seeing it played out through many, many people.

In the end it's easy to judge an addict, and it's easy to judge those who don't "help" or "support" a friend or family member who suffers from addiction. But when it comes down to it, each person can only do so much, and it depends on the individual how much that is. or if it is anything at all.

Tough call, that really depends on circumstances. Is that vague enough???

"Professionals" may have good advice, but I wouldn't neccessarily take it as the "word of god" so to speak.

Its not my responsibility to judge them, but I would do everything I can, but in the end its a personal choice.

Don't give them your PIN.

NA describes addiction as a progressive disease with no known cure, which affects every area of an addict's life: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. NA suggests that the disease of addiction can be arrested, and recovery is possible through the NA twelve-step program. The steps never mention drugs or drug use, rather they refer only to addiction, to indicate that addicts have a disease of which drug use is one symptom. Other symptoms include obsession, compulsion, denial, and self-centeredness.
Addicts often first enter NA after reaching a "bottom" in their life, a point at which life feels completely unmanageable, characterized by "unemployability, dereliction and destruction" and centered around the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more drugs. Every NA member reaches a different bottom, which can be wherever the addict chooses to stop using. In practice, it is drug use and the extreme consequences associated with its abuse that bring most addicts to their bottom many of them sliding along 'this bottom' for many years often never finding a way out.

Hmmmmmmmm,............shut down your lab,.......shoot them,.............or EVERYBODY could just "Get Jesus" I suppose,.....

Question - Did I help them to steal any of those iPods / iPads and whatnot ???

( it NEVER pays be a [known] rat in prison . . . .)

Burial fees.

i would hide a white powdered substance known as sugar haha

What responsibility do you have to help an addict in your family?
Suppose you are the addict ?
No one can possibly understand what drug addiction is like.Unless you have been addicted.
Family member can pray and talk to the addict.....thats about it.
The addict must WANT to stop.There is no real method or treatment to accomplish this.
Pray...and keep praying.

You don't give up.. They may be gone for awhile, but always be there when they've hit rock bottom and finally want help. At that point all you can do is hope that they survive. That way of life does eventually get old!
Good Luck and don't give up.. Also don't be an enabler and be taken for a fool either.

My brother started doing heroin and seeing my mom give him chance after chance, he never recovered. She continued to enable him each time, she allowed him to come back home. Instead, of recovering he stole and lied from her and us. He needed tough love, but she did not offer that to him. I believe that he needed to hit rock bottom to chose recovery; without having my mother enable he would have hit rock bottom.

There are definitely a number of variables that could or would influence this type of decision. None of the choices are easy. From my experience the tough love approach is better than the second chance. The results are better. The problem with the tough love route is that it is actually quite taxing (emotionally) on the one being tough. Second chances lead straight into classic enabling behavior though. Tough love, as guilty as it can make one feel, is allowing the addict to become accountable for his/her decision making...no matter which path they choose to take.