Opioids Attention all opiate addicts. Freedom lies within. A detox recipe that works. Really.

[ememc41]

While it's a nice write up and all, there are a lot of threads about loperamide for withdrawal. It's kinda old news, not much to say.

<<i think the best remedy for arresting opiate addiction is the 12 steps of NA, and a higher power and spirituality in your life>>

For you maybe. Any 'doctor' who prescribes god for a medical problem deserves to be reprimanded- they're no different from self righteous catholic pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control/morning after pills for young, unmarried women. But that's just my opinion.

I think that teaching drug addicts that they have some sort of magical diminished responsibility because they're addicts is dangerous and a form of slave morality (in a Nietzschean sense). NA/AA teaches you to 'be' guilty (profess/accept your guilt on an intellectual level) while giving you permission to not 'feel' guilty (actually accept, experience and transcend your guilt on an emotional level)...the NA model (based on Christian doctrine) preaches a psychological model that equates addiction with Christian concepts of 'original sin'- humans do not commit sins, they're sinners. This is fundamentally life-denying and encourages the worst sort of fatalistic thinking- particularly during relapses.

In my decades of observation the NA/AA route can help people get clean initially as it is very structured and addicts are often respond well to structure (we've been structuring out lives around drugs for example)- however many of its messages are very destructive- when they do relapse (and what, 90% of people have at least one relapse) they tend to go far more off the deep end than addicts who are treated via a social worker/psychology-based programme. Mainly because the 'community alcohol and drug services' (as they're called here) don't make a big deal out of relapsing, it's almost a rite of passage and just something to be worked through. The NA/AA meetings, with their mixture of 'I've spilt more than you've drunk' chronic relapsers, 'I've been sober longer than I was an addict' lifers and the various younger faces who are either experiencing their first instances of addiction or are there for court-related reasons, tend to be dominated by a small cadre of members and are often strangely judgemental due to the existence of very cut and dry 'rules'. Just the % of people happily in NA/AA who keep secrets (alcoholic occasionally smoke pot, drug addict has the odd beer, they have a prescription for sleeping pills etc etc). If you get a good social worker/psychologist team you're gonna have a much stronger support network immediately than NA/AA may ever provide you, even after years of attendance.

Relapsing when in NA/AA and going hard is the same thing I've been saying. The 12 Step Program can be dangerous for this reason. In my opinion, the 12 step model brainwashes people into thinking they have zero control when they start using and that's what they do, even when they tell themselves to only use a certain amount, in the back of their heads, the subconscious tells them they are powerless over drugs so they lose control, and it's happened to me. I became addicted when I took Tramadol every day because the serotonin boost felt so good (I've had depression from as long as I can remember) and then I started using Opana 40mg and it would last me 2 days, and gradually to once a day as I built a tolerance, but I was able to avoid running out. I managed to avoid withdrawals for a long time and I didn't even know what it felt like. Then a bunch of shit happened, and I had 4 types of traumatic brain injury from a car accident. My parents sent me to rehab, and I couldn't stay sober while I was being fed the 12 step program. I stuck to it for a year and a half, and thought about heroin every day, like heroin was my unrequited love. What I've noticed is people like to gossip about what other people in the program are doing wrong. They also share at the tables like it's a rehearsed speech. There are people that are chronic relapsers - they use for a few months and then come back to the meetings, and repeat it like it's an endless cycle. People make a lot of claims as to what they 'live' in their program, and they also talk about people talking the talk and not walking the walk, when they're the ones doing exactly that. I did it. I apologize on behalf of my long rant about NA/AA, but everything you said about the program hits the nail on the head. There are new programs but the problem is that they are mostly in metropolitan areas.

When I left the program, I stayed sober a couple weeks just because. Then I tried smoking weed, but my nervous system is fucked from the car accident I was in, so it just made me extremely uncomfortable. I relapsed on heroin for 3 weeks and relapsed when I IV'd fentanyl a year ago, but I have treatment resistant depression, chronic pain from injuries, and my brain is fucked up, not because I left the program. It's great that it works for people, but they should focus more on what to do in the event of a relapse besides calling someone. It should be more about harm reduction during a relapse, obviously without promoting it.