And let me say your comparison to heroin may be a little extreme and somewhat obfuscates any point you were trying to make.
This is the point I was trying to make:
Drug addiction is a serious, life destroying monster that has lasting consequences for millions of people around the world. It is obvious that everyone agrees there is no comparison between the horrors of drug addiction and coffee drinking. I think the responses to my original post illustrate that quite well. Using the term drug addict to describe coffee drinkers trivializes the true problems of drug addiction.
How laughable would it be for a coffee drinker to attend a drug support group, then stand in front of people with a real problem and say “I am an addict, it has been 3 weeks since my last cup of coffee.”? That is absolutely ridiculous. It would take a doucebag of epic proportions to do something like that. And would probably result in an ass beating of epic proportions from the group of people that were just made the butt of a joke…people actually suffering from drug addiction.
Withdrawal from caffeine might include headache, irritability and minor loss of concentration.
Withdrawal from drug addiction might include, oh I don’t know, running into an ER with a loaded gun demanding drugs. Yes, really. Check out this
bodycam I saw a few weeks ago.
Hell, drug addiction these days often times doesn’t give a chance to go through withdrawal. Ever heard of
Grey Death?
The troll who started this nonsense seems to have jumped to the conclusion that I am upset that he called me a drug addict because of caffeine. That is not the case at all. I am guessing he went straight to that because he was hoping to illicit that response with his post. That seems to have been the entire point of his trolling. Luckily, he is done with me now.
I watched someone go down the road of drug addiction. As I understand it, he started with pain pills and progressed from there. At some point he started on Meth, which may have actually saved his life because that is what landed him in prison. Watching him over several months was like watching someone melt from the inside out, in slow motion. It certainly opened my eyes to the dangers of addiction. Last I heard, about 2 years ago, he was sentenced to 25 years for manufacture of Meth (this about 10 years after his first prison stint and the 3rd or 4th offense). Life destroyed. That is drug addiction.
There is no doubt in my mind that anyone who has seen something like that would never use the same term to describe drug addiction and coffee drinking. I think just the term “coffee drinker” is more than adequate to describe the seriousness of caffeine addiction.
TL;DR: Using the term drug addict to describe coffee drinkers trivializes the true problems of drug addiction.