That seems like a pretty defeatist attitude. "Your brain is screwed up, so just accept that you're never going to be free of drugs." Really? Fuck that. That's no better than twelve step programs and their doctrine of powerlessness. And your brain can change. One of the fundamental tenets of modern neuroscience is the concept of neuroplasticity - that your brain can restructure itself based on changing circumstance and behavior.
Its the paradigm that you need to change. I see drug addiction in the same light as sexuality. A person who is homosexual did not choose their sexuality. Their sexuality isn't not a choice. They can't decide on being gay or straight.
My mother was subjected to terrible stress when she was pregnant with me. When I was born that stress continued. The abuse i suffered in my child appears to have caused physical and ongoing harm. Those stress hormones changed my glia and other parts of my brain causing inflammatory chemicals to be produced, especially during stressful events. These chemicals bind to the Mu and Ku opiate receptors in the PAG, amongst other receptors, causing all sorts of physiological and psychological pain.
I've been in pain all my life and I didn't know it until I had my first shot of heroin. What I thought was a high was really the absence of pain. Even when i've quit taking drugs the the original malfunction is still occurring. In some individuals the pain is worse and in others its less, probably because they had a lower exposure to these stress hormones.
So one person who give up drugs is able to do so because their levels of pain, depression and anxiety are of a lesser degree whilst in my case it is definitely higher so Therefore its not defeatist to accept that some people simply do not have the strength to deal with the pain they are experiencing.
Some people can keep on working with a headache. When I get headaches a lump grows on my right temple and I have blinding pain for several days. I cannot deny that i get this pain and I treat my pain with power pain killers. My other pain, caused by my malfunctioning brain is also a reason why I use powerful painkillers. Years of anxiety make it really difficult for me to deal with social gatherings, so drugs that reverse that are something I take. The problem is that I have to take these drugs regularly in order to be "normal".
But you simply cannot say that everyone can choose to say no to pain and just "man up and deal with it".
I agree with all the stuff you said about guilt, but I disagree with your idea that people should just accept their addictions and settle into them. I think we should always strive to improve, to keep bettering ourselves, even in the face of adversity and failure. To face our problems and work through them, instead of just accepting a lifetime of self medication. And it's absolutely possible - there are tons of people out there who have pulled through all sorts of horrible adversity.
What is wrong with medication? This puritan belief that we should live life without drugs is so insidious and terrible. My brain makes all sorts of drugs and chemicals. DMT, powerful opioids, and even alcholol. Taking drugs is natural. Animals do it all the time.
I agree that we should strive to be better people. That we should ensure that we discharge our responsibilities in a proper fashion, be accountable for our families and loved ones and ultimately do the right thing by ourselves and our society.
But saying that means not taking drugs to deal with legitimate pain issues is wrong. I would not believe you Crankinit if you said your not in pain when your free of drugs.
The real problem with drugs is their cost and purity. If drugs were easily available, regulated, managed and controlled we could ensure that we all get access to the drugs that offer effective relief. I strongly believe that our medical system has been hijacked and offers us second class medications like prozac, buprorphine (for opiate addiction) and so on because its afraid of letting people get "high".
There's a lot to relate to in both posts from chugs and crankinit. One thing I've never felt sure about is the extent to which my issues are a result of aspects outside my control (brain chemistry/genetics etc) or are a result of personal choices - ultimately no one ever forced drugs down my throat, after all. What I am more certain about, however, is that deciding one way or the other would not help me.
This is a big deal to me. I would absolutely not have made it this far if I had ever convinced myself that I was unable to resist the often overwhelming urges to abuse drugs. I have lost the internal battle countless times, but I've also won it many times. I sometimes feel resentful that I have to fight the "good fight" but the alternative would be to not fight, and then things would be very different.
But this is where I believe guilt has deluded us from the real paradigm. You see your relapses as a failure of character. A weakness. That all you wanted to do was get "high".
I see your relapse as you were in pain. A pain caused by real, actual, toxic chemicals that your own body produced. That pain built up until you could stand it no longer and took the drugs that offered you escape from that agony. You were tolerating a pain that is so insidious that you can't even see it for what it really is.
Some days however that pain is not as bad and yes you can choose to forgo medication, and on those days you won what you saw as a battle.
Honestly, this torments me. When I believe that I may be able to "fix" myself (simplistic term, I know) I get anxious because I don't want to waste another minute of this life which I feel I have already lost a lot of. I start to obsess over the idea of "finding the answer". Psychiatric illness runs strong through one side of my family and addiction issues through the other - I seem to have grabbed both and they both manifested around the same time (12/13 years old), so I have had a good amount of time to try different ways of improving/altering/transforming myself (this includes personal pursuits and also psychiatrist help/medications). It was never simply a matter of turning to substances right away for escapism. I have put in work, much of it shaping me for the better, but as time went on there were increasingly more times where I simply felt too tired to keep up the incredible effort of trying to live a 'normal' life while also trying to overcome something seemingly insurmountable.
For years I suffered from crippling anxiety. I didn't even know that what I was suffering was wrong. I thought i was weak, that something was wrong me if I couldn't handle it. Indeed I didn't even realise that it was a matter that I should seek help on. That anxiety was so insane. HOurs upon hours of panic attacks. Covered in sweat. Utterly crippled by delusions and fears.
When I started using heroin I found that those those panic attacks disappeared. It was like giving man dying of thirst a cold bottle of water. Once I had drunk my fill I had even forgotten that I had been dying of thirst.
Addiction is a misnomer. The idea that all your problems will be solved once you stop taking drugs is delusional.....the anxiety, mental illness and physical pain caused by inflammatory products in our body are widespread and significant. Unfortunately the very medications we take form part of a positive feedback loop.
Part of the drug provide relief from the inflammatory chemicals but the other part of the drug actually causes your body to produce more of these chemicals where they build up until the day can no longer afford these expensive drugs. Elevated levels of these chemicals flood out causing you intense sickness a'la withdrawals.
Back to modern medicine.
Modern medicine has been design to avoid giving people "highs" because of the belief that the high is a key factor in addiction. But what if the reality is this. That the alternative medicines aren't that effective because the high is a critical part of the pain relief?
Going back to what I said to crankinit earlier. Happiness is an absent of pain. Perhaps a high feels like a high because your utterly absent of any pain and the medications that don't give a high aren't 100 % effective.
Why would legal medicine's be crippled in this way. Why would their doses be manipulated to avoid giving patients a high, or only allow terminal patients access to these powerful drugs at significant levels. I would argue religion is the true reason. it seems has infected the way our medicine work, and how we look at drugs and addiction. Religion despise narcotics because they're competitive with what religions and god supposedly offer. What else can elate us? Take us all the way to a 10. Let us literally see a high level dimension (like DMT?)
To clarify there are a metric ton of doctors and scientists out there from a religious background. Our laws, the ethics and morality that controls how we test for drugs, the anti-drug laws, how we control substances all relate to how high these substances make us.
Drugs like cannabis are high on the lists of controlled substances not because of its LD50 but because of the sole fact that we get really high from it.
Heroin is my god in some ways. It brings me a salvation, a relief from all pain that nothing else comes close to.
Our entire legal, philosophical and medical system is built on religions which is why they've ensured that narcotics are outlawed. Its religious organisations that actively lobby for illegal drug laws. Look at Pell in the 1990s banning the heroin prescription trial and drug injection centre. There are so many examples of historical and modern insistences where the church, and in other countries where other religions are dominate, have actively pursued efforts to ensure narcotics are illegal.
Indeed don't they say that the real opiate of the masses is religion?
.
