How To Rid Yourself Of Drug Addiction: Part ONE:

CHOOSING THE RIGHT WAY

TO HANDLE YOUR HABIT AND

TO SUIT YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES.

Although, in order to maximise sales of their own addictive products, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies have been telling government, for over 80 years, that substance addiction is basically incurable, the fact remains that since the 1930s, around the world, millions of drink and drug addicts are known to have successfully escaped from the addiction trap by one of three main ways.

To fully appreciate the above statement, it is necessary to recognise that psycho-pharmaceutical so-called “treatment” in the form of OST (Opioid Substitution Therapy) is NOT a cure for addiction !  It is merely a system of moving a drug addict from an illegal supply of drugs to a legal supply, in the vain hope of taking the addict out of a life of crime by giving him free supplies, paid for by the U.K. taxpayer, and costing the N.H.S. £8.46 BILLION EVERY YEAR !

However the famous and authoritative “BIG ISSUE in the North” August 1999 report titled: “Drugs at the Sharp End” provided adequate proof that OST methadone and buprenorphine “treatments” seldom if ever work to procure crime reduction or lasting relaxed abstinence, and some time later the National Treatment Agency (now Public Health England) admitted that OST worked long-term in only 3% of cases – interestingly the same success rate as natural withdrawal with advancing age.

THE THREE MAIN WAYS TO WITHDRAW AND THUS START CURING ONESELF OF SUBSTANCE ADDICTION ARE:

12 STEPS:

The system of mutual support established in 1935 by a group of alcoholic American business men and professionals, plagued with drinking problems sufficiently serious to be ruining their businesses and their family life.

Known originally as “A.A.” (Alcoholics Anonymous) 12 Steps has since expanded to successfully encompass those suffering from Heroin and Cocaine addictions, and all these forms of “anonymous” groups can now be found in most towns and cities around the western world and, in addition, many residential rehabilitation centres deliver 12 Steps on a professional basis over a period of weeks or months before sending a “cleaner” but usually not yet fully cured addict out to continue at his or her local 12 Steps group.

It is reported that some 20 to 30% of 12 Steps practitioners succeed, usually in a period of nine to 36 months or longer, during which time they will successfully and with guts and mutually supported determination, stop using and “one day at a time” fight the effects of “cold-turkey”, or gradually reduce their addictive consumption.

Although 12 Step Groups are basically free of cost, 12 Step Residential Rehabs charge fees dependent mainly upon the quality of the accommodation, service and meals, etc. As a consequence, professionals and business men tend initially to go to a rehab, whilst those of lesser financial means tend to rely solely upon their local group activities.

Whilst reliance on a “higher power” is included in most 12 Steps programmes, no further technical physical or mental steps are indicated, so that the high possibility of reverting to drug usage caused by the presence of metabolites and toxic drug residues in the body, along also with irrational drug influenced decisions in the mind, are in no way dealt with. 

SMALL DOSE STEP DOWN WITHDRAWAL:

This is the system of very gradual dose size reduction recommended by the authors of the “British National Formulary”, published jointly by the “British Medical Association” and the “Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain”.

A system which unquestionably works – particularly for involuntarily addicted patients on prescription drugs whose dosing can be professionally controlled over the often long period of time required to ensure the patient's comfort during the whole withdrawal process, which can be from three to nine months or even longer.

Unfortunately, the different additive and / or hypnotic drugs necessitating this type of withdrawal come in a variety of dosage formats – tablets, pills, capsules and liquids – and all in different manufacturer recommended dose sizes.

In the early stages of small step down withdrawal, the necessary size of the smaller doses can be achieved by cutting large tablets or pills into halves, quarters or even eighths of their original size, but for elderly patients this can be totally impractical beyond quarters and, of course, is not possible at all with most forms of capsule, especially when liquid filled.

Because for patient comfort, the optimum amount of step-down should not exceed 2.5 to 5% of the current dosage, the range of small doses which need to be available can go all the way down to 1% 2.5%, 5%, and 10% of the producer's normally manufactured and recommended dose sizes and, because in many instances, they claim that smaller sizes are more difficult or costly to manufacture, producers endeavour as far as possible to avoid providing and stocking them on a regular basis.

However, in addition, producers are well aware that a patient using 1,095 doses a year of their benzodiazepine or other 3 times a day drug medication will be a lost profitable consumer if they are encouraged to successfully withdraw.  One can therefore from a commercial viewpoint understand a lack of enthusiasm or degree of reluctance on the part of their marketing people to even contemplate offering the above indicated smaller doses.

And, again in addition, regular and easy availability of such small doses would allow General Practitioners to initially prescribe smaller doses, and thus avoid more of the involuntary addiction they know larger doses can so easily create.

Here again, those pharmacists who describe and offer small dose step down withdrawal principles make no comment on the eradication of metabolites and toxic drug residues from the withdrawn addict's body. Nor do their psychiatric colleagues offer any way of correcting irrational computations and weird decisions made during drug overwhelmed events or drug deprived and desperate cold turkey periods.

Thus leaving the withdrawn addict wide open to a resumption of his or her former addiction.

SUPPORTED IMMEDIATE DRUG-FREE WITHDRAWAL:

In some eastern countries, a drug addict (but not a severe alcoholic) is withdrawn simply by locking him or her in a room long enough to suffer through all the grossly uncomfortable “cold turkey” effects of unsupported withdrawal.

Those eastern “service providers” know that whilst deprived drug addicts may well FEEL they are dying, this is never actually the case, and that confronting “cold turkey withdrawal” head-on is considered to be the best way to ensure they will never again choose to use such drugs.

On the other hand, "sympathetic" pharmaceutical drugs marketing departments say they hate to see addicts suffering, when they have available another “helpful” drug which can see the addict through all those nasty “cold turkey” miseries, which, if the addict accepts that, will most likely leave him or her with a new addiction to the pharmaceutical drug prescribed to “help” them through their withdrawal.

So a totally “drug-free”, but nevertheless “supported” withdrawal has since 1966 been used to help the addict to far more comfortably confront the rigours of so-called “cold turkey”, without the possibility of generating a new addiction.

A system of simple locational and body “assists” or exercises applied by a trained staff member at any and all times of the day and night as required, coupled with sufficient water based supplement drinking and minimum eating of mainly green salad vegetables, will in 3 days to 3 weeks see the individual through a withdrawal struggle no more severe than the feelings associated with a dose of influenza.  But whilst 'flu can kill, drug-free withdrawal doesn't.

The period of withdrawal varies according to how long the addict has been using drugs, according to which drugs and which dose sizes have been used, and how often they have been used, and a majority don't take longer than 3 to 10 days.

The product of supported immediate drug-free withdrawal is an individual who is no longer using drugs, but who may still need to be stabilised in the here and now, which can be achieved with further “Assists”, a form of mental and emotional “First-Aid”.

On the physical level, he or she will also need to get rid of the metabolites, hormones and toxic drug residues, etc., stored or lodged in the fatty tissues of the body which, can under hot weather conditions, hard physical work, prolonged exercise or other sweating, be broken down and be released back into the blood-stream thus restimulating an addictive demand for the drug(s).

On the emotional level, the withdrawn addict's mind also needs to have “flushed out” the irrational decisions and weird concepts picked up during drug controlled events and / or during desperate drug deprived cold-turkey periods.

This however starts us into Part Two of “How To Rid Yourself Of Drug Addiction”, which is better dealt with in a separate post.

S.A.F.E. Is A Not-For-Profit Community Support Group Founded in 1975.

_________________________________________________________________________________