The most confusing thing about all of this is “why”? No one, not one person, who read this article saw the transplant denial and said “that’s fucked up! She should have gotten a liver!” We all know that there are fine moral distinctions involved in transplant suitability decisions. And the thing you want is already…

My favorite part about you and okoko is the insistence that these people “wouldn’t” get help while also saying “these people don’t deserve any help”. Treating addiction with punishment doesn’t work.

Right, I definitely made the choice to have a debilitating back injury and be prescribed endless bottles of pain medication* at more and higher doses that lead to my addiction. I definitely had a blast not being able to function without 120 mgs of Oxycontin, literally puking, unable to sleep, sweating, muscle cramps,…

No, your point was that to solve all of our insurance cost issues we should stop this mythical stream of healthy organ transplants going to addicts. Like you said above, what about Dick Cheney’s heart transplant? What if a guy was the healthiest living guy on the planet but he was a rapist? What if a woman was a clean…

There was a time when I was OK with dying of alcoholism. My brain would say “I don’t want to drink anymore” while my body would crack open yet another bottle of liquor and pour it down my throat. I don’t have any explanation for what changed, but I stopped long enough to be able to - for the first time in 35 years -…

No, we tried just banning alcohol without providing any alternatives.

As a former journalist who went all over the country in his ‘20s and knows that a lot of his work performance was affected by alcohol abuse, this hits really close to home. I miss my old job and I miss the great industry I covered but it was toxic for me and I am glad I was able to find peace in another field. I only…

There is addiction all over my extended family so man did this hit close to home.

This story hits home. I have a relative in a very similar situation. Similar age, and with a kid. She disappears for days at a time and shows up again, as if nothing happened. Whenever we try to talk to her about it, she blows up and cuts us off for months at a time. She seems to have been better the last couple of…

Alcohol is seriously one of the worst drugs ever.

Sad story but, I hope it helps someone out today......you don’t know your addicted until it’s to late and then it’s a hard hole to climb out of. It’s all about mental health & behavior modification!

i know. used to go 1.5 packs a day.

My dad drank himself to death 6 years ago, 52 years old... my baby bro drank himself to death 2 months ago, 32 years old, 95% of his liver shot at least he hemorrhaged out quick and didn’t die long like dad did..... shit is crazy I always wonder when it’s my turn, all you can do is funnel the anger and rage and…

Change the name and profession and you have my father’s story. It’s heartbreaking.

I see so many stories every day about our opiate and heroin epidemic. Hundreds, thousands of lives affected. Where are all the stories about the MILLIONS of alcoholics, the dead and dying moms and dads and sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, who are boozing it up with full approval of everyone out there? Why are…

Great article about someone I have no knowledge of other than a vague remembrance of the Jack Morris thing. This article brought her to life, though, and shed light on the sometimes long spiral of an alcoholic. Thank you. Very, very interesting.

Yeah, all of those addicts getting a second chance at life are what’s really blowing our health care costs out of the water. Not inflated medicine prices or skyrocketing executive salaries at all.

Damn, this brought back memories of a friend/coworker I had years ago. Very similar story—super-bright, charming, funny, hard-working, beautiful woman. Drank herself to death at 31. Thanks for the excellent story, Dave.

Sadly, I was able to make an armchair psychologist diagnosis of “bi-polar” before the story reached that point. The signs were all there. Some of our smartest, most brilliant minds suffer from this horrible mental illness. It can help them achieve great things, but at too great of a human cost. Please, if you take…

Sad story, and really hammers home how devastating the effects of alcohol can be, as well as the psychological grip it can have on the individual. Thank you for writing this Dave. Having seen firsthand some of the damage alcohol visits upon not only the user, but families, I wonder why the outcry over tobacco is as…