Isnt alcohol kind of a gateway drug. After i tried that **** a few times i get a CRAVING for it when im drunk. I want to do coke or pills or ***** whatever so badly when im drunk, while i dont really feel the need to do it hwne sober. how did that work for you OP? Not an addict but i can understand why people who dont do coke wouldnt do alcohol either when they quit, because when your drunk all barriers to this stuff just dissapear.

Im a poker player/addict as well. I know that the decision to use is no longer in my hands, Its not a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of a relationship with my higher power.

gregy70723, will you stake me for the wsop 2013, all events?

Had no idea and can't imagine the stress this put you through. All the best

Hey Greg, I still remember battling you on all the stars 200nl tables after party shutdown in 2006. I think we may have chatted on aim a few times back then but I never knew about any drug addictions.

I had a close friend of mine die of heroin overdose a little over 5 years ago. I have another friend who is addicted and has relapsed 3-4 times. He's been clean for the last year+.

After reading this from your op I feel you have the right mindset to stay clean for the long term:

"I don't drink and understand that i can't ever trust myself with any drug ever."

Anyways, congrats on your performance this series. I will be rooting for you in November.

yes 100% can relate to this, i wasn't aware of how bad my decision making could become as soon as i started getting more and more drunk from going to clubs ect. It got to the point where when i was drinking last year i couldn't not combine it with an upper and then finish the night with another downer. Combining uppers and downers is not a good idea but for an addict seeking new highs i would experiment different combinations of things.

Thanks dan and milwak i remember battling a bunch with you back in the day, hope all is well.

damn glad you bounced back and congrats on recent success, those opiates are badd **** news bro

Nice post Greg.

I have been a heavy/social drinker since 15 (im 30) and dabbled in drugs in my teens. I had a scare with mdma where I thought it was coke (snorted about a gram of it before I realised) and it put me off drugs for life, havent touched them since and have no desire to - its been 9 years.

I have some friends who are full blown coke heads and alcoholics, some who have had drug pysocosis and some who have fried their brains. Some have had help and are sober some havent and are battling it everyday. Personally I feel I have a slight dependancy on booze, but not an addiction - it relaxes me and I enjoy drinking. I think being pro makes me more strict with myself as a lot of people expect you to fail (people that know nothing about poker) so I dont wanna **** it up. Life is all about balance and I truly believe that about everything that one can do/take. Drugs on the other hand I have seen some people destroy their entire lives (not just on coke, through mdma/lsd/opiates etc) and havent been the same since even if they are sober/clean so I thik they should be left alone and cant be balanced as one bad trip/batch and you can be in trouble.

Btw anyone who is interested in addcition should download Intervention, I'm pretty much addicted to watching it - maybe because I have a lot of people in my life who are/were addicts & need help and me myself who teeters on the edge with addictive things (gambling/drink etc) but they dont consume my life. Its a great show.

GL in October.

Intervention is an awesome show. I wish they would change up there coverage of it once in a while instead of having the same layout for every show but for sure a great show and very realistic.

Hey Gregy,
Congrats on your success, nice to see someone who I've played with in the past hit it big. Not sure if you played while taking roxi's or not but it seems you would have had to with the high dosage you were taking in a given day. Did you ever find that they helped you stay calm in long sessions and "wade" through the downswings with ease? Did they help or hurt your focus/concentration during sessions? I have a few friends hooked on them and am trying to understand them better in order to get them off them. Thanks.

k10 your a sicko first of all

i never took them when i played online but was playing live on them and felt super unfocused and nodding off at the table. I find it amazing that people can play well on them while playing online since you have to be so intensely focused, especially the more tables your playing. Being on any drug while your playing definitely helps deal with the swings since your mind is out of reality essentially. Hope you can help your friends out, they are a very dangerous and expensive addiction to have.

take care mate

gregy

Gregy is a heroooooo. Congrats on staying clean and the success that it's brought you in more than one way. #TeamMD

Greg,

Played with you for most of day2 in the 6m, and thought you played very well and were a nice guy. I was pleased to see you had won, and was amazed when i realized how sick your WSOP was. Congrats on your success.

I have a lot of experience with the subject at hand, although mine differs from yours as it relates to my life today. At any rate I think it took courage to make a thread like this and i wish you all the best.

Not to derail or anything but I just wanted to post my opinion on the "gateway" drug question. My feeling is that alcoholism/addiction is a disease, whether you end up on crack/heroin/alcohol/cocaine/ whatever it's all the same sickness. For those people a logical place to start would be marijuana and it progresses from there. Personally I was always curious about altering my state of mind and pot was the easiest to obtain and seemed the least harmful to me at the time (I was like 15 or so). It's also a logical drug for addicts in recovery to relapse on... they think they can handle it but it always leads them back to their drug of choice. Basically I think it's the disease that's the problem, not smoking a joint.

Anyways I don't think a normie (a non alcoholic in AA speak) smokes a joint and is all of a sudden driven to hard drugs and ends up a junkie...

anyways great thread, and GL in November!

great post penelope i couldn't agree more with your gateway opinion.

to everyone joining this discussion, i appreciate your honesty and respect towards the issue. y'all have made some great post, i enjoy checking in on this thread a few times a day.

I wnna know whats the difference between ppl like you and ppl like me. I have times where I smoke alot (weed and cigs) but I never ever get addicted to it. For example last week I smoked about 20-30 cigs (and I enjoy every single one of them) caus a friend whos smokin was in my city and we met up alot (+ I pretty mcuh always smoke when I`m out) but I literally never ever had any signs of "hardneed" for anything like that. Same for weed. I sometimes smoke 10 joints a week for a short period and then I just stop for a few weeks and never had any addictive signs (psychologically or physically).
I know 10 jays and/or 30 cigs a week isn`t much but still it seems like its enough to get addicted.
I think the biggest factor is just routine and getting ur brain used to all that ****. I just dont see any benefit in being a pothead or smoking cigs allday if I can just casually do it and have a 10x better feeling.

I haven't done in any drugs in a very long time, but for a while I was dabbling in cocaine, and I had a stripper GF who was bringing it home quite frequently, so I was doing lines and numbers with her and her sisters.

I pulled myself out of it just by will power, ironically helped by smoking weed. Weed seemed to be kind of an "anti-drug" for me, making me averse to alcohol and coke. I felt really green and organic and mellow on weed, very healthy, and would go work out etc. Then if they were all smoking cigarettes, snorting coke, drininking vodka etc, I didn't want anything to do with that. I just wanted like fresh air, meditation, sex, like that.

So, for me, marijuana brought me OUT OF the kind of tension cycle and rat-pushing-the-reward-bar syndrome of feeding the dopamine monster minute by minute with another cig, another drink, another number, another line, etc. Weed was, for me, something that brought me out of the cycle, and if I thought about drinking while I was high it really wasn't appealing.

I long ago stopped smoking weed, finding that I am sharper and more productive generally without it, however it's been so long I can't really be sure. But I like where I'm at. Some people I know seem to operate at a very high level and smoke weed sometimes, so I don't really judge. I will have a few drinks, a few glasses of gin or red wine now and then, maybe some jaeger bombs if I am partying with friends.

I always felt that 43forty was one of the best regs on FT. I never knew that was you.

Much respect gregy.

Best of luck in October.

thank yourdoom always thought you played well.

anilyzer, weed always was my drug of choice for dealing with withdrawal stages of harder stuff before then quitting smoking all together. good to hear you got out of the scene, its not one you want to be involved in

Subject hits close to home for me as well. It's awesome that you are opening up in such a candid, honest way especially with the amount of attention you are and will be receiving in the next couple months. This could benefit and inspire a lot of people.

One comment I wanted to make. You said you're not sure if people are born with the disease of addiction or not. I've done some research on the subject and came across something that I believe explains this well (if you believe in the disease model of addiction). In the documentary, a leading doctor in the field compared the onset of addiction to that of diabetes. Some people, due to heredity, are more at risk to acquire diabetes in their lifetime. Take two people with the same genetic predisposition to diabetes. One eats McDonalds every day and does nothing while the other consumes a balanced diet coupled with regular exercise and a healthy lifestyle. The former will be far more likely to acquire diabetes even though the are at the same genetic risk. The same can be said for addiction. If there is a lot of family history of addiction in ones family, they need to be cognizant of that and try to minimize exposure to risk factors and environments.

And also for those who advocate taking the same addictive all or nothing personality traits out on a "healthy" activity, I would have to disagree. Everything is best enjoyed in moderation. And while working out and such can be great for you, they can also be overdone and abused as well. I understand your point in that creating another outlet is necessary. But I believe one should strive for a balanced approach to that outlet, and to try and move away from the negative obsessive traits. I agree with Greg that yoga is an amazing mind, body, and spirit activity that can help to center ones self (just got back from a hot yoga session actually). Kudos to that man.

It's sad that I don't always practice what I say. But I'm happy with me right now and know I always have to stay on my toes or I could end up in some bad bad places. Thanks for letting me share and thanks for sharing, and best of luck to you bro!!

Yoga tends to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This puts it in opposition to say, coke, meth, adderall and ritalin (forms of meth) etc which stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. Alcohol and other depressants seem to be interacting with the sympathetic nervous system also, although I am not sure of the mechanism. I happen to be reading Naked Lunch right now so this is on my mind, that book is completely mind blowing.

But marijuana, as I recall, kind of put me in a more parasympathetic state, although it was "trippy" and caused some distortion. I can get to those good places now without help from drugs, so I don't worry about it, but back then I used weed to get to my meditative or intense workout mindset etc.

You can see the difference if you think about sex and food. Somebody could smoke weed, and then have a nice dinner, cook a delicious meal, hang out. Then have sex, whatever, have sex all night if it's available.

Whereas clearly drugs like coke, meth, heroin, X, crack, etc, have kind of short circuited the system, and the craving that people have for those drugs FAR outweighs everything else. They are just up in their heads craving for more of that [meth, crack, heroin, coke] and tend to not be interested in food or sex. I guess I've heard that they can get sex-crazy on meth, which is hard for me to imagine, but in any event, I'm sure they are far crazier for meth itself than sex.

I still do feel like those drugs should be legalized though, bad as they are, even if they are severely abused they probably wouldn't destroy lives any more than severe alcohol abuse, or severe fast food abuse, nicotine abuse, etc. The thing that makes coke/heroin/etc so insanely destructive is that they end up costing thousands of dollars a week.

Like if you could buy pure coke at Walgreen's for $99 an ounce it wouldn't be that much of a problem, it wouldn't destroy lives or whatever, more people would use it instead of coffee and a few people would snort hella coke or whatever and have to go to rehab.

just my two cents on this, sorry if I am off putting in any way

Greg,
Congrats on all your recent success at the tables. Super well deserved. You have always been a beast in my experience and it's always fun to play with you/against you (from a challenge/learning perspective).

You touched on in briefly, but can you talk about your experiences with addys (your usage, how they affected your play, what benefits/downsides there are, etc.). You mentioned how weed was a sort of gateway for them but it always seemed to me like they were sort of oppositeish drugs.

I know a couple friends who I believe are severely dependent on addys and I was just wondering about your experiences (the good, the bad, the ugly).

Thanks so much for making this post, and good luck in your battle both on and off the felt.
dlpnyc21
ps. am specifically interested on your thoughts about how they improved your play, or harmed it, your dosage increase over time and the amount you needed to maintain the same sense, and whether or not you still use them, etc.

I feel like when you first start taking them, you feel smarter, more focused, and can last longer. Then, like all other drugs, you have that feeling fade and increase dosage. Eventually, you don't even necessarily feel smarter or more focused, but instead, you actually feel dumber and less focused unless you take the drug to get back to normal/par. I am not sure if that makes sense, but that is my experience.

What was a harder withdrawal process,coke or the roxys?

I agree with this.

Greggy, I didnt really get what your feelings were on adderall. You just briefly mentioned that you used it every day during the 2011 WSOP. Do you think it was detrimental or helpful to your game? Did you find it addictive? How do you compare it to cocaine?

Ive been smoking weed every day since I was 17. Im now 27. Pot is also half of my income. Ive tried to quit a bunch of times. But when Im sober it feels like I have servere ADD or something. I cant concentrate on anything. When I smoke I feel "normal" and everything is more interesting. Its mot like I can just not buy anymore. When I wake up I can smell the weed through my safe. Everyone I know smokes. Everyone I know comes to me for weed. I feel like my only chance to quit is to stop selling and get a whole new group of friends. This seems daunting and a little extreme. Any real pot heads ITT that have quit successfully? Im not talking smoking once a day. Any advice would be great. Im sober as Im writing this so sorry if its all over the place.

gregy was always such a nit i cant believe he was a coke addict. gl in wsop