- Question
Can you trust a recovered drug addict?
Drug addicts are known to be pathological liars. They will say anything to get more drugs or get out of trouble. However, people who experience addiction are often radically different people once they’re sober. So can you trust a former addict? Do you discount their past and let them start fresh, or do you make them earn back your trust? At what point can you actually trust the former drug addict? These questions are important because of the sheer number of addicts we have in America today.
Yes, you can trust a recovered drug addict
Addicts should not be defined by their past addiction. Once a person’s addiction is in the past, people need to treat the recovered addict with the same level of trust and respect they’d give anyone else.
No, you cannot trust a recovered drug addict
This position holds that you cannot trust a recovered drug addict. It argues that the behaviours of addiction — above all dishonesty — tend to persist after the drugs are gone, and that a recovered addict always remains at risk of relapse, leaving their reliability permanently in doubt.
Sometimes you can trust a recovered drug addict, it depends.
Lumping all recovered drug addicts together leads to faulty generalizations. Some of them can be trusted and some can’t. It’s not fair to write them all off as liars, and so it’s up to individuals to judge the trustworthiness of each, individual recovered addict they encounter.