Some just drink alcohol, others smoke pot and sniff cocaine. People abuse prescription drugs like valium, codeine, and dilaudid, and people sniff gasoline. People who abuse drugs can be loving parents, hard workers, next-door neighbors, bank tellers, janitors, students, lawyers, nurses. Use simply means drinking, smoking, inhaling, injecting, or swallowing a chemical substance. If one drinks a beer with dinner, one is using alcohol, but not necessarily abusing it.
Abuse can occur over a period of hours, days, months, or years.
Abuse is not dependence. Withdrawal is the syndrome caused when a dependent person stops taking the drug to which he or she is addicted. Alcoholics who go for even a few hours without drinking may experience delirium, black-outs, tremors, nausea, seizures, and hallucinations. Heroin users who stop taking heroin often experience intense muscular pains, uncontrollable shaking, diarrhea, and high fever. For people struggling with substance dependence, quitting without treatment can be as risky as continuing to use.