[QUOTE=chowder]
diggleblop I apologise most sincerely if you felt offended by my post, this was not intended, quite stupidly I jumped to the conclusion that your addiction was thru’ self inflicted abuse, I feel really silly now :smack:
Yes I do realise that some people need drugs to combat pain, it’s a lose/lose situation and I feel for those people who need the drugs simply to live life without constant agony.
[/QUOTE]
Agont=y can be psychological as well as physical. This lies at the root of drug dependency.
Modern treatment of drug addiction and dependency recognizes that the major analgesics have more than one mode of action- they cause immediate pain relief for the perceived immediate pain and additionally they cause separation from the psychologically unwanted consequences of pain.
I have experienced this directly when I suffered from a near ruptured appendix some thirty years ago. I was in considerable pain as I was waiting to be transferred to hospital and was prescribed repeated doses of sub-lingual buprenorphine- an opiate analgesic. After fifteen minutes of so it did stop my perception of the immediate pain, but well before that it changed my perception of the pain so that I was totally intellectually aware of the pain- knew where it was, was able to rate the pain etc., but this awareness had absolutely no emotional attachment- I was not anxious about the pain or its consequences- I was emotionally detached from everything, merely intellectually aware.
This explains how it is that many people use and abuse opiates and many people who do so do not progress to dependence and addiction. Figures are difficult to come by, but there is nowhere near a 100% conversion rate from use to dependence to addiction. Those who become fully dependent or addicted are those people with a psychological pain that the opiate effectively creates the separation from the anxiety attached to their current social situation.
As noted above, rapid detox (cold turkey) is extremely unpleasant for the person involved and others around them, but is simple to do and results in a complete independence from the chemical affects of opiate addiction. Once detox is complete, there is no chemical craving for the drug involved. However, there is a learnt behaviour that such opiate use creates a psychological protection against the pains of the person’s life (the agony above) and they will be likely to relapse if they do not learn to avoid this process.
There are no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dependent persons. The mechanism is exactly the same whether the original source is medical prescription or street use.
Additionally, many people are able to start and stop opiate use without major withdrawal problems (at least no more so than nicotine or alcohol).
Finally it should be noted that most of the personal and societal negative effects of opiate addiction are related to the societal pressures placed on the dependent person, rather than on the use/abuse of the opiate in itself.
Blaming the victim is one of the least helpful strategies in trying to deal with this complex social problem. It is like blaming the poor for their poverty.
