Real pain killers suck just as much as suboxone. All opiates suck realistically. Whats the point of getting high anymore its amazing how many people on this forum are craving something thats guaranteed to make them feel like crap.
You wanna get high for 4 hours so you can spend the next 2-3 days in a funk? I do understand drugs help us escape from reality, and some times in my life it was exactly what I needed. But I'm starting to realize the escape is NEVER long enough.
You're always pulled right back into a shit life and to add to that now you have wds to deal with. If your life is bothering you the last thing you should be doing is looking to get high.
Get a job, find a girl, so surfing, work out. There are SO MANY things that may not be as fun as opiates when you do them, but AFTER you do them you'll be blessed with something called self esteem and optimism.
Fight the good fight & don't give in. Drugs do NOTHING good for us but make us want more and want to cry when we can't it.
So what do you do when you got the job, have the girlfriend, workout regularly, eat healthy, and still feel like complete and utter shit? I don't think people turn to opiates because their life is boring, or because they lack self esteem. I think most opiate addicts, people who really crave opiates and only opiates, have a neurochemical deficiency in their endogenous opiod production that leads to them seeking out opiates just to feel normal. For most people, opiates will get them high, but later make them feel like crap. For the true opiate addict, they always feel like crap and the only time they feel better is when using opiates. I am not using this an excuse for abuse, but I think our entire idea about treatment and addiction is almost dead wrong and that is why it fails so terribly.
Almost every opiate addict I have ever met, was suffering from long term depression and generalized anxiety, long before they began experimenting with opiates. Usually through drug experimentation or by plain accident (surgery for example) they discover that after using opiates they actually feel decent for the first time in their lives (or for as long as they can remember). That was definitely my experience and I have talked to several others whose experience mirrors my own. It was like a light was suddenly turned on in our head and we knew right then, that this is what is was like to feel "good". I would not use opiates again for another 3 years, but during that time my depression became worse and worse, and by the next time I used opiates I had been using several other drugs as well in a quest to just feel decent. Then the wonderful bliss that was experienced earlier is rediscovered and I started using a bit more frequently. When I used I felt so much more myself, I was energetic, not anxiety ridden, much more social, much more productive. So I used more and more and addiction got the better of me. The problem was, addiction was more of a hassle and a legal problem more so than one of wrecking my life. My life felt destroyed before I became an addict, opiates were the only bright spot in my life. Most people do not understand what this feels like and therefore, people give advice like yours about just going out and being a good productive member of society. I was that before and I was a god awful mess.
Eventually though my life became unmangeable not due to the opiates, those I could manage, but the cost of the opiates and the risk inherent in illegal activity was too high for me and I stopped using. I quit and remanined sober for 4 years during which I took up weight training, martial arts, obtained degree from Graduate School, dating a gorgeous woman, had a good job, and everyday I hated my life and was miserable, tired, exhausted, etc.. I tried yoga, meditation, AA, NA, counseling, everything, I begged god, I went to groups, everything I could and the benefits would be fleeting at best. After 4 years of being sober I hurt my back and I took 2 vicodin from a friend and about 45 minutes later I felt the best I had in 4 years, from 2 stupid pills. I was devestated because I had come to realize that there was just something wrong with the way my brain was wired and the only thing that made me any better was opiates. I felt cursed to live in a country that made usage of the only thing that made me feel better, a crime. I was not hurting anyone, I just wanted to feel decent, so I could go about my life. I had researched the brain and addiction compulsively, trying to find some way to make myself better, but my research seemed to confirm my suspicions about bad wiring. The brain functions by employing several different neurotransmitters, like serotonin and dopamine, but the brain also produces its own natural opiods. You need these to be happy. The brain is composed of matter, and just like any other organ in your body, there is variation amongst people, and all are subject to some type of dysfunction. It made perfect sense that just like how an superabundance of dopamine is linked to manic phases, low serotonin levels with some depression, and how so many types of psychiatric disorders are the result of just an imbalance of certain chemicals in ones brain, that opiate addiction is more than likely the result of low levels of natural opiod production.
This is not to say that all opiate addiciton is because of this. Anyone can become physically addicted to opiates because of their physical properties, but certain people are absolutely predisposed to addiction due to their brain chemistry. The body is intelligent and it will seek out substances that it needs when deificient. Ever hear about pregnant mothers eating chalk, it is due to low mineral levels to where they are compelled to eat certain objects to correct the imbalance. We like sugar so much because starvation used to be a major threat so our bodies developed a preference for sugary, fattening food, because it provided easy calories. Almost every opiate addict I have spoken with has told me that long before they ever used opiates, they just felt like something was wrong with them, they were depressed, anxious and nothing really helped. In my case, I was a runner, and no matter how fast or how far I ran or pushed myself, I could never, ever acheive a runner's high. These all indicate some type of endogenous opiod deficiency that is the source of the problem, and the person is merely trying to correct an imbalance within them.
This idea makes perfect sense knowing what we do about the brain and its basic operating mechanism's, but somehow it is taboo in our society to claim innate differences in people's brains and their abilitities. There is this huge myth that we all have unlimited amounts of free will and freedom in making decisions in our life and everything comes down to a person's willpower. This is simply not true and is pure fantasty, but it is the foundation of the entire Western system of religious belief (we are all completely responsible for our behavior and are punished for our sins accordingly) and our economic system of free market capitalism to where any person as long as they want something bad enough, they can achieve it. This is total bullshit and flies in the face of everything we know about in medicine and psychiatry.
Yes, we all can make choices, but for some people, some choices are more free to make than others, for some people they are compelled to behave in a certain way, etc. It is just like problems with the rest of the body, you don't tell someone who has Diabetes due to their pancreas burning out to just will themsevles some more insulin, it is not going to happen, it can not be done. you can not tell someoone whose spinal cord has been severed to just will it to regrow and they will walk. Yes, someone can always point out some anomaly and say that they did it through will and belief and this is horseshit as well, the truth is,w e have no idea how some of these miracle cases happens, that is it, we simply don't know, because I am sure that there are many people whose faith was just as strong as the lone person who was healed, who were left crippled. So it is with Brain chemistry, I think we take this mythological fantasy about the brain and ignore science when it comes to things like addiction, free will, and personal choice. Yes, we have some range of free choice, but each person's range is determined by predetermined biological structure. I can't cure myself of epilepsy if there is too much neuroelectricity going on between my brain hemispheres, so how is getting a job supposed to help with my epilepsy? I think the same can be said for most types of hard addictions.
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