“Addiction Is Not A Disease”

This topic is a little bit easier to relay across, but there are so many things that are so very wrong in our country, yet people think that everything is hunky dory. Any direction you look you could find an issue.



The biggest thing right now, the biggest issue in our Nation, is the Opiate Epidemic. It is absolutely insane reading comments on any story that has to do with drug addicts, in particular the one from yesterday with the parent’s passed out with their kid in the car. I am a recovering addict myself, so I know exactly how it works.



It is extremely damaging to see all these people sit there and say “ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE”. There was even a registered nurse posting that Addiction is not a disease. I sent her a private message asking her “Do you get to pick and choose out of your diagnostic manuals, which ones are diseases and which ones are just snake oil?”



You can have your opinion all you want, but the FACT IS, Addiction is a disease that targets the brain. It overrides your thought processes, it literally convinces you that it is okay to get high no matter the circumstance. Okay, so to put explain it as simply as I can, I have had a friend, who was on felony probation years ago, he had a meeting with his Probation Officer.



Now tell me, if you had a meeting with someone who had the power to lock you up at any moment, and the number one rule for your freedom is to stay clean and not test dirty on a drug test, what would you do? Well first off, if you are a “normal” person you probably will have never have used hard drugs. But most importantly, if you weren’t addicted you would go “I really shouldn’t use, I am about to meet with my probation officer. I’m not going to use”:.



Well for a person that is addicted, it isn’t so easy, or as cut and dry. As an addict your mind actually convinces you that you can get high right before walking into the Probation Officer’s office. This may seem unfathomable to you, because you aren’t the one with a disease, you might even think “That sounds so silly, so fantastical, that is a load of bullshit. You just want to get high and you make excuses to get high”… Well yeah, we do make excuses, but we are delusional and actually believe them because we suffer from a brain disease/mental disorder called Substance Use Disorder.



To put it more bluntly. This has nothing to do with being selfish or being weak or not knowing what is good for you. Let’s say that You are an addict, a man has your beautiful child in a chair, they have a gun to your child’s head and there’s drugs in front of you. The guy with the gun tells you/asks you ‘If you get high, I am going to kill your child, Do you understand? Do you value your drugs more than you value your child’s life?“



Now a normal person would go "What is this a joke? Give me my child.”. Someone who is addicted will at the very least stop and actually think about it. But some addicts, if they are far enough gone, wont even hesitate and will get high. Addiction warps the mind and make’s addicts believe lies that no sane person would believe. Addiction would justify getting high and risking your child’s life. It’s not a matter of right and wrong, because right and wrong are gone. There is only getting high.



NOW, people will say “Well they made the choice to get high that first time. They chose losing the ability to choose”. This is the most ignorant way to view this, but I guess they say ignorance is bliss.



Do you realize that studies are showing that most of current addicts started off with a prescription painkiller? So a majority, who are now addicted to heroin, started off with Prescription Painkillers. They weren’t trying to get high, they were trying to treat their physical pain and were following their doctors orders. They used to push OxyContin 40mg tablets as if they were tic-tacs for bad breath. You could go in with a sprained ankle, and you would leave with Percocet’s, if not 10 or 20mg OxyContin.



When I was a kid growing up, there wasn’t much anti-drug education that focused on Prescription Painkillers. There was no information. I had heard all about the evil Heroin, the evil meth, the evil crack cocaine. But I never once heard my Health Teacher mention the evil Oxycontin or the evil Vicodin. I am sure it was mentioned, but they didn’t make it out to be the big deal that it actually was. Shit, the Pharmaceutical Company PURDUE actually told doctors that OxyContin WASN’T addictive…. OxyContin… Not addictive. What a fucking joke! It is worse than Heroin, but the Pharmacuetical Companies lied to push it as non-addictive to sell as much as they could for as many ailments as possible.



So, 16 year old me is at my grandmother’s house. On her bedroom nightstand is a pill bottle that said “40mg Oxycodone ER generic for Oxycontin”. I had heard kids at school mention it, saying it was fun. I had looked it up once online, I saw stories from people saying it was super addictive, but I went on the Purdue website to read what they had to say about their product. Their website said that it could be habit forming if taken over an extended period of time at high dosages. Then it went on to say that it had a low potential for addiction (a decade later, a class action lawsuit would be filed and won. Purdue claimed that their claim that “Oxycontin has a low potential for abuse/addiction” was based on chronic pain patients who took it as prescribed. It later turned out that Purdue actually forged medical reports saying that Oxycontin had a low liability for abuse. )



So, I did my “research”, I looked on the Purdue website, because hey, it’s their product, the information must be correct. Let’s also not forget that I was 16 years old, I was a child, my brain was not developed yet. 16 year old’s aren’t allowed to vote, they aren’t allowed to drink, they legally are not supposed to be sexually active (that is a major life decision that can alter their whole lives), they aren’t allowed to make MAJOR LIFE DECISIONS. Their parents are supposed to do that for them since, you know, they aren’t able to think into the future about how current actions will have reverberations into the future. So SIXTEEN YEAR OLD ME, tried Oxycontin, which years later they would deem to be on par with Heroin as an addictive substance, Heroin is the most addictive substance on the face of this planet. Well Oxycontin/Oxycodone is just as addictive, if not more so because it is pure, and SIXTEEN YEAR OLD CHILD ME was able to get my hands on it, was lied to by a pharmaceutical company about how bad it actually was when I researched if it was okay to consume, and then TRIED THE MOST ADDICTIVE SUBSTANCE ON EARTH. CHILD ME. Fast forward 11 years, and I am still trying to beat this addiction. All due to the fact that I made a decision at an age when you shouldn’t be making lifelong decisions. Most 16 year old’s don’t think the rules apply to them, they always think they are the exception to the rule.



I wrote all this up, because you have people sitting there going “Yeah, you may not have a choice now whether you get high or not, but you made that choice to get high in the first place.”, Well if you read what I wrote and understood it, then you will quite clearly see that I, and the vast majority of current Heroin/Opiate addicts out there, didn’t quite know what we were getting into when this all began. I was a child who made a bad decision, such as all kids do at some point, but in this case it was a decision that would effect the rest of my life. It also didn’t help that I also had misinformation from the company that made the drug that started all of this. Then you have the millions of Heroin addicts, who started off following doctors orders by taking the painkiller medication that they were prescribed.



Now this isn’t to say that all the Opiate addicts out there didn’t seek it out, some wanted to do heroin and try to live the junkie life style that is so seemingly glamorized by so many artists/musicians/rockstars. Those addicts certainly are out there. But the vast majority got sucked in via prescription painkillers, or started out while they were a naive child.



Anyways, there is a lot in this world that makes me sick. How we treat people that we have power over, whether they are Heroin Addicts or Native American’s that we have been raping and pillaging for the last 524 years. I don’t think we will ever have true equality, but I would love to be proven wrong. We can at least have tolerance, respect and compassion for our fellow human beings.



One last thing before I end this post (SORRY FOR HOW LONG IT IS), but another thing people have to realize is, the government isn’t invested in actually bettering our society. If they were, Marijuana would be at the very least Schedule 2 (Some medical benefits but highly regulated), MDMA would be Schedule 2 (Medical benefit for Treatment Resistant Depression and PTSD) and the most important out of all (Since Opiate/Heroin Overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in America right now… THE ODDS ARE YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO DIE OF A HEROIN OVERDOSE THAN A CAR ACCIDENT.) is the fact that there is a treatment for Opiate/Heroin addiction that has a really great success rate and has been proven to actually help addicts get clean without any sort of Medication (think Methadone or Suboxone.)



The treatment is Iboga (or Ibogaine) treatment. It works for most chemical dependencies (Heroin/Opiates, Cocaine, Meth, Alcohol). Traditional Rehab programs have a 3 to 8% success rate at 5 years post treatment. Meanwhile the standard success rate for Ibogaine Treatment Programs is 40-50%. Keep in mind some of these programs will only do an Ibogaine Detox and send you on your way. The program’s that are more time intensive and more in depth have a success rate of 70-80%. But Ibogaine is illegal in the United States, it is a Schedule 1 drug…



The truth is, they want addicts to keep shuffling in and out of rehab. It is an industry that is no different than the Prison Industry or the Military Industry. Drugs have to be kept illegal to keep the Prison Industry alive, the Wars must continue on to keep the Military Industry alive and rehab’s must not have too high of a success rate otherwise they will go out of business. Not to mention the Pharmacuetical Industry they would have no one to push their Painkillers on, or use their Opiate/Opioid Replacement Therapy drugs (Methadone/Suboxone) on to.



They don’t want people treated effectively, all these industries would go out of business.





