We Need To Change Our Conversation And Mindset Around Addiction
On February 8, 2014, Emmett Rensin published a piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled “The End of Quitting” following the overdose and death of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Six days prior to the publishing of the article, Hoffman was found dead in his New York apartment with a needle in his arm. A former heroin addict, Hoffman had been in a rehabilitation facility less than a year earlier, and died, like many former addicts, relapsing.
The article opens up with a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower about his cigarette smoking: “I can’t tell you if I’ll start back up…But I’ll tell you this: I sure as hell ain’t quitting again.”
It’s a common and well-known fact, to anyone who’s ever been addicted to anything, that quitting a habit is exponentially more difficult than starting it. After Hoffman passed, “embarrassment seem[ed] to be a major theme. Shame. It’s a shame he had to go this way.” But Rensin makes sure to follow up this point with a fundamental point: “we should remember that nobody would be more ashamed than Hoffman to see his own body, cold on a bathroom floor.”
Rensin made sure, in this article, to note that this article wasn’t an obituary about Hoffman’s death — but rather a comment on the reaction and national conversation that happened, “about this old story we tell…
