Addiction.................

"...The nurses laughed along with him; people always laughed and smiled with Dick Beardsley.  Then the doctors came, and they cut away his clothes and saw the extent of his injuries.  The nurses stopped laughing.  They wouldn't look him in the eye.  Dick felt a stab of fear.  And on the heels of the fear, from a place that didn't seem like his leg but a place beyond his leg, he felt the first cold touch of pain.
     Things moved very quickly then.  They took him to a room and hooked him up with an IV-drip as the pain spread like black floodwater and panic rose in Dick's chest.  He knew how to handle pain; he was a marathoner, after all, which is another way of saying he was a pain wizard.  But this was something different.  This was black and cold and overwhelming.  The nurses had him hooked up to a bag of clear liquid that looked like his dad's gin.  What could that watery stuff do against the black pain massing up from his mangled let, punctured lung, fractured wrist, broken ribs, severe concussion, and cracked vertebrae?
     But just as the black tide was about to swallow him whole, the Demerol molecules washed over his brain's opioid receptors. Dick rocketed into a new and wonderful world.  A world of float and dazzle and laughter and light and peace and no strain, no worry, nor corn to get in, no seconds to save, no falling-down Swedish farm with 9-foot-long timber wolves prowling the woods to tear you limb from limb and PTOs spinning in the yard to do the same.  Nothing nothing nothing but pure joy.  Never in his days had Dick experienced anything remotely like this.  Mindful of his parents' example, he had never touched alcohol and never considered recreational drugs, not even marijuana.
     The Demerol hit him harder than the packed, frozen earth of the barnyard.  Here was truth and light, something so infinitely more pleasing than farming or fishing or running as to be laughable.  This was home.  It was so wonderful that is some higher power told him he could go back, avoid the accident, but never take Demerol, Dick wouldn't hesitate - he would turn the offer down flat.
-John Brant, as excerpted from Duel In The Sun