When I was little, grown ups around me talked about a book. I thought it must have been a pretty good book as many adults were discussing it. Some book about women who took pills. Many of the adults around me took pills too, so in my little world it was not too clear what the difference was between the people in the book and the people around me.

A few years later as I was nearing my teenage years there were the Hippies. I saw Hippies on television. They dressed kind of funny and they smoked a lot. They also seemed to be having a lot of fun and enjoying life. They were not serious and troubled like the adults around me seemed to be.

According to the adults around me they were bad kids who were on their way to big trouble. They were doing drugs. I was not sure what drugs were as they had not made their way into my little world, but being adults they seemed to know. At parties or small friday or have a beer or mixed drink get together at the nearest bar these hippies were discussed over glasses of beer and various concoctions of liquor some of the adults preferred instead of beer.

During my teenage years some of my friends and classmates started experimenting with pills they stole from their parents medicine cabinets. I could not see anything in taking pills for heart trouble, boys taking birth control pills, or what other pills they found in their quest to discover, but the effects were funny and probably fairly serious at the same time. Watching them get sick, they did not look anything like the hippies on television or the drinking adults that were still talking about them.

Somewhere along the line probably from anti smoking campaigns at school led by those few teachers who did not smoke, I learned about addictions. After graduation between late teens and adult hood, I took up smoking and learned about addiction first hand. It is something I would not recommend anyone try out. It goes from new and interesting to something you aren’t happy about, but can’t seem to change, to deciding it’s either quit or eventually die from.

I eventually realized people with addictions were constantly in my life. People with drinking addictions, smoking addictions, even some of the women who talked about the characters in, The Valley Of The Dolls, probably never realized the book was also about them, as they were addicts and did not know it. As I left those things and some of those people, I thought I left addiction behind me.

Over the years as I opened my eyes to what was, and not what I thought there should be I had to come to terms with the idea, that I never left people with addictions somewhere else, in my past. All I had managed to do was distance myself from the addictions that I saw in those around me. I had been living in a rose colored bubble and did not see what really was.

Every day no matter where I go, or what I do there are people who are addicted to something. Shopping addicts, gambling addicts, excitement addicts, food addicts, gun addicts, political addicts, internet addicts, even work addicts to name a few addictions. Whatever we as humans do and most of us enjoy, someone is addicted to it, and it is causing untold problems in their lives.

One of the most frustrating truths of life for me is knowing no one can help any of these people. Unless they reach a point that they are willing to change, they continue feeding their addictions, or jumping from addiction to addiction because that is there personality. Legal gambling is a good microcosm of addiction.

When I play poker, I play with people who are addicts. Some of them hate poker, but think playing poker hides their excessive drinking, or need for excitement craving. Other people who think poker is immoral, yet spend too much of their income on state sponsored gambling, lottery tickets or scratchers. Such is life as we know it.