First, my credentials for posting:
I have been addicted to pretty close to every drug discussed in OD. I have shot dilaudid, 32mg 3 - 4 times a day (IM), booted a bundle of dope a day, and injected 360mgs of oxycontin a day. I ate somas like it was going out of style and popped benzos like there was no tomorrow.
I used ketamine to excess to the point of being hospitalized due to the pain 3 times in my life. Most people settle for one, I couldnt stop period.
Ecstasy stopped working on me in 2001, might be due to me eating too many pills every night for too long. Who knows?
I held an awesome script for the longest period of time. 5 10mg IR dexedrine per day, 6 20mg IR ritalin per day.
Whenever I would drink socially, I would black out. An hour after arriving to the party, gone, bam, record time. When I tried to black out on my own, I never could.
On ghb, I almost died. Came closer to death than ever before. I have been hospitalized over 40 times due to drug abuse, overdoses, blackouts, etc. et al. So I believe my physical 'Death Meter' When it tells me "Son, you are going to die if you fall asleep."
Today, I am sober. Been that way for the past 3 months. Or so. Rehab? Hell no, I have been to rehabs before however, none of them worked. Brighton Hospital 2 times, Teen Challenge 2 times, and a full stint at Narconon.
How the fuck did you do that WB? Let me tell you. It was not the fellowship of AA, but the Big Book, that showed me the way. I go to AA meetings not to keep me sober for the next 24, but to find the new comer. I try to help those addicts and alcoholics that need help. I offer them a solution.
I identify myself as a recovered alcoholic at meetings, the urge and desire to drink and drug has been removed from me today. I know that if I do what I'm supposed to do, I will never have to be rehabbed again.
From the Big Book - In our belief any scheme of combating alcoholism which proposes to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure. If the alcoholic tries to shield himself he may succeed for a time, but usually winds up with a bigger explosion than ever. We have tried these methods. These attempts to do the impossible have always failed.
Rehab is a paradoxical situation in my opinion:
If you absolutely do not want to get clean, going to rehab will not help you one bit.
Conversely, if you do want to get clean, you do not need rehab. All you need is willpower.
Again, the Big Book - Once more: The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His defense must come from a Higher Power.
suboxone then NA meetings worked for in the past for quitting and staying off heroin/opiates for several years. Relapsed soon after stopping going to NA. I didnt like goin to the meetings, but they do help alot of people stay clean by giving support
NA has got to be the most spiritually bankrupt organization around. NA promotes a meeting addiction, and once you stop going to meetings, you are fucked. Thats pretty much the same thing that AA now promotes. AA's success rate is around 3% - 5% nowadays? Back in the day, AA had a success rate of 50%, in Akron Ohio, it was 93%! Akron just used the Big Book.
Chop Quoted:
There are some great ideas/links in this thread. Glad so many people are willing to share their stories and help each other. I fully agree that there are two components to quitting: stopping the use/abuse of the drug, AND increasing positive habits...
...Someone above said that if you really want to quit, then you are able to quit on your own; willpower is enough. The contrapositive to this rule is: if you cannot quit on your own, then you do not really want to quit.
That's simply wrong.
It depends on the individual. Some find themselves able to taper and leave on their own, but for those deep in addiction, I think the weight of the empirical evidence is that willpower and desire aren't enough by themselves.
Willpower and desire to quit ARE enough, though, to allow an addict to get some access to tools to quit, and to discover what tools work best for them. For some it might be NA. For others it might be rehab. Different tools will work for different people.
There is nothing shameful or weak about using tools, like cognitive therapy, like NA, like rehab, to achieve your goal. Frankly, it is a far greater sign of weakness to NOT seek out those tools, and use them. We wouldn't get very far as individuals or a species if we didn't seek the help and knowledge of others to advance ourselves. Can you imagine the early modern human being, depressed and discouraged after his group had another losing encounter with a tiger or mastodon, deciding that it would be "shameful" to figure out how to use spears to solve the problem? Or the contemporary human being who thought his bone should really be strong enough to heal the fracture on its own, without medical assistance?
Tools rock, spiritual tools are far better. From the Big Book - But we saw that it really worked in others, and we had come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of life as we had been living it. When, therefore, we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved, there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at out feet. We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.
I totally agree, the 12 steps are BS to me, I think they are desigend for 50+ year old Burn outs who need to believe that somthign greater then themselves is at work.
My theory is you got yourself addicted you can get unaddicted.
never underestemate teh power of your mind, if you set your mind to it you can do anything.
Its easy to fail when you think yourself powerless against your addiction, I see it the exact opposite, I am like alright your a fucking solder! you can hold your own in battle, Heck you call Point! So bring it on is some fucking pill gonna get the best of you, Fuck no aint how things roll. Muscle up mother fucker its time to move out.
thats my mantra when I get down, look at the drugs like they are your worst enemy for which you have NO love!
Hrm.. From the Big Book again - And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone, even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.
Chop Quoted:
I think everyone forgets that just because they left AA/NA, that must have been the reason they relapsed. I don't think it has anything to do with it at all because who made the decision to sotp going to AA? You did. So leaving AA didn't make you relapse, you just didn't want to be sober anymore so you stopped going to AA.
And in my opinion AA is a cult. I'm also not a fan of religion, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt if you wish. Here is more information on it though:
http://www.orange-papers.org/
Also, one of the most important things I read on that site was the opinion that those who go to AA seeking help were obviously trying to get sober in the first place and would go to great lengths to get sober. The fact people get sober in AA is not because it works, but because when people start going to meetings of their own will, they actually want to get sober! And then they think "OH, AA does work!" Well I agree it's a pretty good environment for it, but it wasn't AA that did all the work, it was the person. AA didn't write 4th step that took hours and hours, the person did. etc. etc. etc.
This is not meant to be anything other than helpful. I truly believe in what I'm saying. And while environment can be key is getting sober, I personally don't think brainwashing myself into believing in god or any higher power to get sober is right anyways. And yes I stayed sober for over a year and a half, but a lot of the time I was MISERABLE. Why?
Because I need to be on medication to thrive. Sucks for me, but oh well. I'm tired of living a miserable existence - morals and legality be damned. (Although I'm not a horrible guy, and I rarely do anything illegal.)
Contrary to popular belief, you can be on medication and still an AA member. I know quite a few members of Alcoholics Anonymous who are in fact on medications. Also, meetings don't keep you sober, the steps keep you sober. Meetings allow newcomers to be introduced to the steps. The primary purpose of an AA meeting is the newcomer.
I think that there are different degrees of "addictive personalities" - there are people who become addicted to one drug or another, then there are people who are virtually addicted to every drug they have tried - and would relapse if it was around them (but most of the times it is not due to having it get out of control in their lives).
I think there are plenty of ways to address having an addictive personality, and helping satiate ones own desires in life is possible. It's just that many people who have the "extreme" version of having an addictive personality (poly-drug addict) do not want to work on themselves, they refuse to, they don't think they have a problem, etc. and stems a lot from people with personality disorders.
Overall, if you are able to work on yourself (or at least want to, and think that there is room for improvement), then there's a few important steps you can take to help yourself out:
1) If you can, try talking to a professional psychologist, or start group therapy. Either way, this has the potential to help you work on yourself if you are willing and able to change for the better.
2) Gain a base of friends who are ambivalent about using drugs (are neither pro nor con) - so that they don't trigger cravings by talking about it, etc, by bringing it up either in a positive or negative light. It's good to have friends to just be able to be real with and talk to about subjects that are meaningful and deep in life. It is also good to be able to get things off your chest with such people who will be able to try to understand what you're going through without being judgmental about it.
3) Distance yourself from people who are drug users or abusers. People who are straight up drug addicts - who are still lingering in your life for one reason or another - they may tend to have their more negative qualities rub off on you incidentally or subconsciously - like, the desire to use drugs, or a general laziness/boredom. It is better to leave people who are unwilling to help themselves out in life behind. The only people who are drug users you should be willing to keep as friends are those who have worked on themselves so they aren't desperately/hopelessly addicted.
There's a few other things, but I'm going to end this post here for now to get some feedback/brainstorm some other ideas.
It kinda sounds like your solution is what AA has turned into over the past 30 years or so. A social club, where people go if they are afraid of drinking or using. From the Big Book - Assuming we are spiritually fit, we can do all sorts of things alcoholics are not supposed to do. People have said we must not go where liquor is served; we must not have it in our homes; we must shun friends who drink; we must avoid moving pictures which show drinking scenes; we must not go into bars; our friends must hide their bottles if we go to their houses; we mustn't think or be reminded about alcohol at all.
We meet these conditions every day. An alcoholic who cannot meet them, still has an alcoholic mind; there is something the matter with his spiritual status. His only chance for sobriety would be some place like the Greenland Ice Cap, and even there an Eskimo might turn up with a bottle of scotch and ruin everything! Ask any woman who has sent her husband to distant places on the theory he would escape the alcohol problem.
I have been around drugs quite a bit over the past month, no issues at all. Before, I would have been bad news around them, real bad news. Now, not so much. I don't call someone if I have an urge to use, cause I don't have any urges to use. That shit doesn't work anyways, not long term. Not if you are the real McCoy like me.
My solution: I can only help those around me. If you live ~30 miles of Ann Arbor, Michigan, send me a message. If you are willing to do whatever it takes and truly want to stop using drugs and alcohol, there is a solution.
To finish, last, but definitely not least, from the Big Book: Yet we had been seeing another kind of flight, a spiritual liberation from this world, people who rose above their problems. They said God made these things possible, and we only smiled. We had seen spiritual release, but liked to tell ourselves it wasn't true.
