Knowing the abuse of drugs and how people behave when they are under the influence will also keep you from enabling an addict.  Wondering if someone in your life is an addict?  If they are, you will likely see some telltale signs.  Some of the most common signs of drug abuse are:

A drastic change in friends, unexplained absences, lying and stealing from friends and family, getting in trouble with the law, ceasing to care about relations with family members, incoherent or intoxicated like behavior, spending excessive time in seclusion, drastic changes in behavior and/or attitude, decrease in work or school performance, uncontrolled spending, the selling of personal items, no attention to personal appearance, paranoia.  Of course, every addict is different, so the way that one addict behaves is not necessarily the way that another one will behave.

You may also find that their behavior changes depending on the type of drug they used and when they last used it.  Drug abuse symptoms may be hard to spot if you aren’t sure what to look for.    At first, these symptoms may be something that you don’t even see, as some of these things take a while to be noticeable to those around the addict.  Of course, many addicts are very secretive, and they try to cover their tracks.  As the addiction progresses though, they will become more careless and their change in appearance, attitude, and other symptoms will catch up with them, and you will be more likely to notice these things as time progresses.  Now that you know what the symptoms of drug abuse are, you may be more aware that someone in your life is an addict.  It can be difficult to know what to do when someone in your life is abusing drugs, but at the very least you should not enable the behavior.  Instead, you should encourage the person to get help, and if possible, try to stage an intervention to help save their life.