If you subscribe to the idea that # addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children - paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic - are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.
David Sheff (2009). “Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction”, p.142, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt