In the quiet, brutal aftermath of a relapse, or in the hollow ache of craving, a familiar villain appears in the narrative. It’s the person who sold you the substance, the one who first handed you the pill, the website that delivered the escape, the friend who offered the false comfort. It is so tempting, so human, to point the finger outward and lay the blame for your addiction squarely at their feet. The dealer, in all their forms, makes for a perfect antagonist—an external source for an internal chaos. But if you harbor a genuine desire to succeed, to not just escape addiction but to build a life of substance, you must perform the most difficult transaction of all: you must take back that blame. You must, forever, stop blaming the dealer.
This is not about absolving bad actors or ignoring the predatory systems that profit from dependency. There is real darkness there, and it deserves condemnation. But that is a societal battle, a legal fight, a separate war. Your war, the one for your own soul and future, is fought on a different terrain: the landscape of your own choices and your own responsibility. The moment you cede the authorship of your addiction to someone else, you hand over the pen for your recovery as well. You make your sobriety contingent on external forces—on the world becoming a better place, on all temptation being removed, on everyone else behaving rightly. That is a recipe for powerlessness. It leaves you perpetually waiting, perpetually the victim of circumstance.
Blaming the dealer is a seductive form of self-sabotage. It constructs a story where you are a passenger, swept along by the currents of other people’s malice or negligence. In that story, you are not the one who said “yes” the hundredth time, you are not the one who sought out the connection, you are not the one who chose the temporary fix over the hard, real work of living. That story may feel easier to carry in the short term, but its weight is infinite, because it is the weight of hopelessness. If the problem is out there, then the solution must be out there, too. And you will always be at its mercy.
Success—real, lasting, transformative success in overcoming addiction—requires a fundamental shift in ownership. It demands you stare into the mirror and say, “This is my problem. I allowed this in. I continued this. And therefore, I can end it.” This is not an act of self-flagellation; it is an act of profound empowerment. It is the reclaiming of your own agency. When you stop blaming the dealer, you are not saying what they did was okay. You are saying, “Their part in this story is over. The rest of the book is mine to write.”
This mindset is the bedrock of resilience. The world is, and will always be, full of dealers. They will appear as substances, as toxic relationships, as easy escapes from pain. Your success cannot depend on their disappearance. It must depend on your own fortified will, your own clear boundaries, your own hard-won strength. That strength is only forged when you accept that the truest enemy, and therefore the only conquerable one, is not the shadowy figure on the corner, but the compulsion within. You fight what you own. You cannot fight a ghost you’ve placed outside yourself.
So, let the lawyers and the policymakers deal with the dealers. Your job is more immediate and more vital. Your job is to build a life so meaningful, so rooted in your own responsibility, that the dealer—and all they represent—simply becomes irrelevant. Stop writing the story of what was done to you, and start writing the story of what you will do for yourself. That is the first, and non-negotiable, chapter of any success worth having.
