Do you have any sources on morphine being used as a cure for alcoholism? I don't doubt you, I just thought I was pretty well versed in drug use during the age of indulgence and I never heard of that particular method.
In regards to "maturing out of the addiction" - about 10% of alcoholics/addicts experience spontaneous remission without any kind of outside help, pharmacological treatment, counselling, AA/NA etc. It's a well documented phenomenon that has statistically been proven time and time again in longitudinal studies of addicts & alcoholics, but why & how it happens is still a mystery. To truly tease out the causes of spontaneous remission it would take many extremely expensive studies that follow addicts for decades and require hundreds of thousands of participants to look for something that nobody could make any money off of, so unfortunately I don't think we'll be discovering why it happens any time soon.
Interesting, do you know what the success rate of NA/AA has been found to be? 10%. There's a theory that the success stories of NA/AA are just the addicts/alcoholics who experience spontaneous remission but mistakenly attribute it to their 12-step groups. That's a very cynical view though - personally I think the group therapy aspect of it as well as bonding with other addicts must be good for people, but I think its usefulness is massively overstated and its infiltration of our culture and our entire conception of recovery is an unfortunate relic of a bygone era and I can't wait for the modern approaches to continue growing to the point where they eclipse that archaic cult. but I digress - I don't think codeine itself has any particular property that would lend itself more to spontaneous remission, except perhaps for the fact that it has a ceiling dose and so the user cannot just keep increasing the dose to get higher? That would make some sense come to think of it - the user increases their dose to around 300-350mg but their tolerance continues to build yet taking more has no additional impact on their high, so they are inclined to stop. Is that what you're getting at?
Here is an article with which to start:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ant-to-treat-heroin-addiction-with-marijuana/
I think that cannabis can play a medicinal rôle with a lot of things, including some aspects of alcoholism and narcotics addiction, the medicinal uses being why it was actually in the US Pharmacopoeia all the way until 1942, five years after smoking it was outlawed, but the people going around who say that cannabis is a replacement for narcotics for analgesia, especially chronic pain, especially when they are businesspeople trying to get a product sold, are reprehensible. The effect on chronic pain where it can help includes the nausea that a lot of people get from narcotic analgesics, and since we know that euphoria is an inextricable part of pain relief, yes cannabis can help with pain. But it is not a
replacement for narcotics for analgesia. I almost, but not quite, want the legalisation bandwagon to hit a bump like a loss on a plebiscite or firm going bankrupt or something because of that group of pot folks peddling that kind of propaganda and fiction and throwing narcotics and benzodiazepines people of all types and drinkers and tobacco smokers under the bus as the kids say these days. Now that scientific research has resumed after 80 years of almost nothing about cannabis, I am sure that all sorts of useful components will be found in it. I know there is a debate about the extent to which Δ-9-THC and similar substances make CBD work better for the medicinal uses found for the latter, and I expect research will find there is certainly a positive impact.
It was often Avicenna who was quoted as saying that alcohol was a caustic which destroys living tissues and systems whereas opium was not injurious in this respect and would be preferable. The fact that opium is probably the substance with the strongest case for being regarded as a panacea probably had more to do with the attitude that led to trying it to cure alcoholism than anything else. Mix opium with spices and other natural products and its rather large spectrum of things which it can help is expanded a bit further. Morphine, codeine, heroin, but especially opium in a few forms was also used for diabetes and related afflictions as well, and it was the invention of the means of manufacturing insulin which made this obsolete, as insulin goes straight to the source in solving the problem. When antihistamines were invented starting in the late 1930s, it was primarily opium and derivatives, ephedrine, belladonna and some other herbal medicines (and for short time amphetamines, found during a search for refinements on ephedrine) that they replaced.
The highest dose I have heard about with codeine is 650 mg q4-7h for someone who probably was a comprehensive but not rapid metaboliser (one of the least common allele mixtures when it comes to Cytochrome P450) and who was using antihistamines for potentiation so side effects were mild for her. . . and the morphine coming from that dose is still well below what I would think the hard ceiling that would be imposed by literally every single opioid receptor being occupied simultaneously. That must be a massive amount of any pure agonist opioid (but partial agonists need at least 75 per cent of the receptors to start working in the first place which has something to do with the uses to which they are put, such as moderate pain and pain relief for folks with an elevated addiction proneness) She switched to hydrocodone and found it to be easier to manage and was taking quite a bit less than the conversion to codeine may suggest which is why it seemed to be a case of the codeine perhaps just not working as well for the intended purpose the hydrocodone did, and not a case of iatrogenic addiction as she was at one point concerned it may be. I do know of recreational users whose codeine use was capped by the side effects, but they switched to something else and/or would arrange things to kick down to wash out some tolerance on a fairly regular schedule, which also did return the pleasure level to where it was previously as well. So it very well could be something like that in some cases.
Doctors, former and recovering addicts and scientists have told me that the maturing out is of opioid addiction happens in the range of about one case in 8 to 15 and it is actually a mystery to them and/or could very well be a different exact mixture of causes for each person.
The relapse rate for morphine and heroin at least these days I have heard quite often quoted as 98 or 99 per cent, though I would also point out that relapse is part of the physical part of the matter and by no means a failure, especially if it happens years later, but of course any treatment protocol that is based on the premise that someone will be an addict the rest of their life even if they never use again, and there is no difference amongst drugs is going to bound to failure because it is based on junk science, confirmation bias, and superstition. There also is something which I think would be obvious but some people seem to be ignorant or just not care: Getting rid of withdrawal symptoms makes the user feel better. Feeling better feels good, and when people, or animals, find something that makes them feel good, they are apt to do it again. The bodily impact of narcotics probably partially pre-ordains the relapse rate for the above reasons, and when 12 Steps and other things of the same store work, it could be because they give the person a plan and suggestions that may not have occurred to them.
As critical as I am of the rehabilitation racket because of what they have done both to addicts and innocent bystanders like chronic pain patients and even people going to the emergency department for painful afflictions and even accidents, I know people for whom AA worked, and on one occasion I had a friend whose husband was getting into trouble with gambling and all three of us got copies of the Big Book and used that to at least lay out a plan and it did work and actually didn't take a really long time. Compulsive gambling is even more apt to cause trouble because there recently has been research about it that shows there are a lot of people who get a bigger bang out of a near miss like getting 5 out of 6 numbers in the lottery than actually winning, and there are several logical fallacies which lure people into more and more gambling even without this strange effect, which was reported about in
The Economist about two years ago. Do people get extra high when they pull the needle out of their arm and spray it all over the wall? I seriously doubt it.
Something which may make AA more successful than its imitators with narcotics probably has to do with the fact that alcohol is so hard on the body that any heavy drinker probably feels miserable and looks very bedraggled for at least a short time each day and there is really no way to avoid that. In contrast, there is a Stage 0 with narcotics withdrawal that lets the user know the tank is getting low before they actually start to feel rotten.
The aftereffects and hangover may be part of the connexion to morphine being tried as an alcoholism cure. I know of quite a few people who use codeine and dihydrocodeine especially as the basis of effective hangover cures particularly when paracetamol, buffered aspirin and/or an Nsaid like naproxen along with vitamins, electrolytes, and replacement fluids and salt are taken concomitantly. I've never heard of anybody getting hooked from doing that because two mornings a week is probably the most often they need it, with five days or more days off before the next time and often weeks or months or more. I don't see much evidence of codeine or dihydrocodeine being good preloads to
prevent a hangover, though, and there are various other reasons not to do so. The only things I have seen work as any way as a preload would be tomato juice especially with salt and lemon and/or lime juice, Gatorade and so on, but still there are going to be effects the next day if one gets really ploughed. My experience with trying to drink more than a minimal amount when on strong narcotics round the clock is the hangover in 15 minutes, no enjoyment from the alcohol, and a sudden craving for a blast of narcotics -- this really seems like the liver can process alcohol or narcotics but not both at the same time. It is not really a disulfram type reaction but it still is frustrating and feels like shit.
