Introduction
Almost every answer you'll find to this question is a sermon that begins by not believing you.
So let's start from the assumption that you're telling the truth. You like it. It does something for you that nothing else does. And you're asking why you should surrender that, which is a reasonable thing to want an answer to before surrendering it.
Here is an attempt at an answer that doesn't require you to already agree.
First: Nobody Has to Stop
There is no obligation. You are an adult. People make choices that shorten their lives constantly and we do not generally demand justification.
This article is not going to tell you that liking it is denial, or that if you really examined yourself you'd find misery underneath. Sometimes there isn't. That claim is moralizing dressed as insight, and it's part of why people don't trust the people making it.
What You Like May Not Survive the Arrangement
Here is the first genuine complication, and it's mechanical rather than moral.
The brain's "wanting" system and its "liking" system are separable. Research finds that with repeated use, wanting becomes more reactive over time while liking flattens or declines.1
The consequence is specific: the thing you like tends to stop being likeable, while the pull to do it grows. People arrive at a point where they no longer particularly enjoy using and cannot stop wanting to.
You are not being asked to give up something you love. You are being told, by people who have been further along the same road, that the thing you love is on a schedule, and that the schedule does not include an option to remain at the point you're currently at.
That may or may not persuade you. It is at least a fact rather than a lecture.
What You Like Might Be Available Elsewhere
Worth taking the claim seriously enough to interrogate what's in it.
People rarely like "the drug." They like something specific it delivers: the quieting of a particular anxiety, ease in a room full of people, a break from a thought that won't stop, the sensation of being interesting, sleep, the end of pain.
Each of those is a description of an unmet need, and each has other routes to it — some medical, some not, all slower and less reliable and none requiring you to hand your week to a chemical.
This is not a promise that the substitute will feel the same. It won't. It's an observation that "I like what it does for me" is a sentence with a hidden object, and identifying the object is the first useful thing anyone can do with it.
Tolerance Means You Cannot Stay Here
The same point from a different angle.
Whatever you like about it, you like it at the current dose and the current frequency, and neither of those is stable. Receptors downregulate. The amount required to reach the same place increases. The place itself becomes harder to reach.
The version of this you're defending is a snapshot of a moving thing. Almost nobody's use stays where it is, and the ones who assume they'll be the exception are drawn from the same population as everyone who wasn't.
The Costs Are Real Even If You're Enjoying It
Independent of whether you're happy.
Unregulated supply is inconsistent and increasingly contaminated with substances you didn't intend to take. Tolerance falls faster than people expect, making a return after any gap dangerous. Combining depressants multiplies risk rather than adding it. Using alone is the single largest determinant of whether an overdose is survivable.
None of these care about your assessment of your own wellbeing.
The Second Half of the Question
You asked why you should, which implies an obligation, which implies someone you'd owe it to.
Look at who that is. If the honest answer is nobody — no partner absorbing this, no child constructing an explanation, no friend taking the calls — then the autonomy argument is strong and this article has little to say to you beyond the paragraph above about naloxone.
If there is someone, then the question changes shape. It stops being about whether you're entitled to your own choices and becomes about who else is inside them.
That's not a moral trump card. It's just where the argument from autonomy actually stops, and it's worth knowing where that is rather than assuming it extends everywhere.
The Question Is Being Asked, Which Is Interesting
Offered without triumph, because it isn't a trap.
People with genuinely uncomplicated relationships to a substance don't usually compose a defense of it. The question arrived for a reason — a comment, a morning, a private observation you haven't fully examined.
The prompt is the only piece of evidence in this whole conversation that came from inside you rather than from someone arguing. It's worth locating.
Name the Line Now
Practically, whatever you decide.
If nothing would change your mind, that's worth knowing about yourself — unfalsifiable positions aren't reached by weighing evidence.
If something would — a health finding, a specific consequence, a line you haven't crossed — then write it down today, while you're clear-headed. Thresholds that are never specified have a way of receding at exactly the speed you approach them, and the person who will be assessing whether you've reached it is not the person reading this now.
The Bottom Line
Nobody has to stop, and you may well be telling the truth about liking it. But wanting outlives liking — that's the documented direction of travel — and tolerance means the arrangement you're defending isn't a place you can stay. The autonomy argument is strong and it stops where other people are inside the consequences. If you continue: don't use alone, keep naloxone nearby, and write down now what would change your mind, because later you won't be the one deciding.
Sources
- Wanting grows, liking flattens — Robinson TE, Berridge KC (1993). The neural basis of drug craving: an incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Brain Research Reviews, 18(3):247-291. See also Robinson & Berridge (2025), The Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction 30 Years On, Annual Review of Psychology 76:29-58. View source ↗