Addiction, medically at least, has to do with compulsion, not frequency. A person who has a cigar on the weekends, or a single cigarette at night after the kids go to bed, isn’t necessarily doing it compulsively, or to a degree that it negatively effects their life (aside from the whole smoking thing). Now does that in and of itself mean you SHOULD go do that? I would say no, especially with alcohol, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, etc. but would anyone from a medical standpoint say they were an addict? Not if they knew what they were talking about.

That brings us to the flip side of that, now if you WERE the kind of person that did it on the weekends with enough frequency your brain will start to desensitize to the dopamine dump, and start to offload that behavior to your prefrontal cortex, making it a subconscious action, and eventually lead to that compulsion that we call addiction. This effect is multiplied if you allow yourself to be distracted while you do the thing, as you are strengthening the subconscious pathways of that action.

Anyway, I think the middle path would probably be the best. No need to completely abstain 100% from EVERYTHING, and no reason to let ANYTHING become a subconscious habit that controls us without our understanding.

TL:DR Asceticism = bad extreme indulgence = bad Allow yourself to be human, but be ultra mindful of your human condition

Why you assume he got wasted every time? There different ways to get different levels of high. I like using cannabis but I hardly get wasted anymore (last time was years ago tbh). I do get medicated though, fully functional. Highly recommend dry herb vapes for these purposes btw. !vaporents@lemmy.beyondcombustion.net coming soon