I'd like to know what it did for you.
I understand it helped you not crave cocaine but did it also boost your mood or something like that? Why was it so effective to you?
Immediately the NAC felt like a weak benzo to me, I don’t care much for benzos, I felt very lethargic. I actually tapered myself off cocaine using it (if you can believe it, yes, tapered), so it was just lethargy but there was no compulsion to redose the cocaine. It’s hard to describe, but even triggering events, instead of making my mind go in an endless obsessive loop until I would eventually redose, just resulted in a brief spike in anxiety and then...nothing. The compulsive and obsession thoughts just stopped, and so my mind was calm and focused on the day. It helped me to really plan and incorporate structure in my day, follow through with that structure, and that’s where I
think the L-Phenylalanine helped. It’s hard for me to say definitively as it didn’t have such immediate effects like the NAC, but within a week I noticed finding joy and pleasure in things I hadn’t enjoyed since I was probably a teenager, specifically in mundane everyday tasks. And that’s another thing, usually every time I would get sober, I would start to think about before I started drugs and that would ultimately trigger me into relapsing. It just allowed me to process and explore those emotions without the spike in anxiety and resultant obsession and compulsive behavior that would follow.
Now, to be fair, I think I have been mentally ready to stop using drugs for quite some time now (the whole endocardtis and open heart surgeries and heart failure really put a damper on the whole thing). So, that definitely factors in here somewhere. This just helped me bridge the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be.
Where the L-Phenylalanine actually fits in here, I’m not as clear. It definitely had no noticeable effects for the first week, but somewhere after that, I just noticed a sharp elevation in mood and finding reward in normal tasks, that under any other circumstances at seven days clean would have seemed horrible boring and I would have avoided at all costs. Somewhere, between the NAC and L-Phenylalanine, basic, ordinary, every day tasks just became more manageable, and helped me incorporate the structure I needed to start building a solid foundation going forward.
I also noticed my mood swings, irritability and inability to concentrate were almost non-existent problems early on, as well, whereas any other time those were always insanely large barriers that almost always resulted in my failure to stay clean.
How well this would correlate to methamphetamine, I’m unsure. I think the bigger consideration, as always, is the mental state going into the process.
I’ll just add, too, I was eating insanely healthy and exercising everyday. I really wanted... no...
needed, this time to be successful. At this point, I look forward to going to the gym and exercising and the resultant high. It’s like the best, and most healthy, high I’ve ever been “addicted” to. I started this process with 9 venous ulcers on my legs, feet and arm, unable to breathe, edema in my legs and abdomen, my pacemaker wasn’t working so my atria and ventricles were contracting almost on top of each other (it’s not good when the atrium contracts and the valves are still closed, let me tell you, you’ll feel your pulse smash nonstop in places you can’t even imagine), and I weighed 287 pounds (30 pounds of it was water weight I lost in less than two weeks —heart failure and cocaine just don’t mix). It’s hard to even believe, it seems like all this was another life time ago.
What a year 2020 has been, for real.
