Freedom from Opiates

“The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage.”
― Carrie Jones, Need    

Addiction is a loss of freedom. Being chained to a drug is more than a metaphor — the chains of addiction are palpable to the person dependent on a drug. In recent years there’s been a huge problem with opiate addiction arising from use/misuse of prescription painkillers like Oxycontin then progressing to heroin. I’ve written about it on this blog several times — here and here. This is about freedom from opiates, the process of addiction and some of the obstacles to dealing with the problem.

First of all, withdrawal from opiates is excruciating. It takes at least three months for the brain to clear up and it can take up to six months to get through post-acute withdrawal symptoms. It takes a long time for the brain to readjust. In the 1950s American healthcare providers started using Methadone, first synthesized by German scientists in WWII, to treat opioid addiction. Methadone was a compromise to achieve harm reduction, not so much to deal with the problem of addiction.

There’s still no freedom from addiction with Methadone maintenance, although it’s better than buying heroin off the streets and taking healthcare risks on a daily basis. Suboxone is getting good results as a withdrawal tool, but a treatment plan is needed along with the Suboxone. In 2015 it’s time to treat opiate addiction with the ultimate goal of abstinence, unless there’s a medical reason to continue opiate use. Most people addicted to opiates don’t need to use opiates long term for medical reasons — some might have become addicted due to taking pain killers for an injury or physical condition, but addiction drives people to use the opiates long after the injury is healed. Even with constant pain, research has discovered opiates aren’t ideal for long term pain management. Just because it’s difficult to treat opiate addiction doesn’t mean that we give up and settle for harm reduction. Many, many opiate addicts have recovered and are living free of drugs.

So far, symptomatic solutions have failed to create freedom from addiction for far too many addicted to opiates. As long as we treat symptomatic problems with symptomatic solutions we’ll never apply fundamental solutions to address the fundamental problem of addiction. When regulators discovered Oxycontin was abused at high rates, they tweaked it to make it harder to abuse, but this just made those addicted to turn to the streets to buy heroin. Pain medication misuse was reduced, but heroin use increased.

Unless the necessary resources are available to support long term recovery, there’ll be little reduction in opiate addiction. Freedom is living fully, improving self esteem, returning to an active social life and re-bonding with family and friends, not maintaining the fog and slow destruction of addiction.