I picked-up my addiction shortly after I graduated college. I drank strong drip coffee every day of the week......except Sundays. On Sunday morning, shortly after the preacher would start his sermon, I would start getting these headaches, which...once started would escalate to full-blown-bangers by the end of the service. And the preacher was pretty good, so I account that it was not his fault. A buddy of mine in whom I confided, ask the first probing question......."How much Coffee do you drink in the morning during the week?" I answered ~3-4 cups before lunch. Well that was it....I was an addict.

My day job at the time was as an analytical chemist developing assays for pharmaceutical drugs in blood serum and urine. I've seen UV spectrophotometric traces of urine samples from coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers. The difference is about as subtle as comparing the Amazon rainforest to the salt-flats of Bonneville. Realize that caffeine is only one of the MANY xanthenes that get extracted from coffee during the brewing, absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion process. And caffeine is not the only addictive xanthenes in the mix.

My dad is an MD working in treatment of drug and alcohol addiction. He would say that the biological variability for the threshold of "addiction" is huge from person to person. My guess is that <20mgs per day could get you addicted, but some folks might be less and some folks will certainly require more. The only solution I have found is to insure that my daily caffeine titer is high-enough to prohibit the side-effects of caffeine withdrawal. Espresso has dramatically effected my caffeine consumption, because there is less caffeine extracted during the short 20-25 seconds of exposure to the solvent (water) than there is with drip or press-pot. Is it bad? Naw...works great for me and it's simply not worth the trauma to kick-the-habit. Sure I could wean myself off of it, but why put myself through that!!


http://www.drugfreesport.com/choices/dr ... feine.html

I absolutely have to have coffee in the morning. Routine tasks I can handle without it, at least until the headache starts; intelligent thought requires caffeine first.