Opiate addiction treatment

We’ve written about opiates and how they act in the brain, and we’ve written about mixing opiates with benzodiazepines — this is about opiate addiction treatment, withdrawals and long term recovery. Opiate withdrawal won’t likely kill you, but it might make death seem easier. After a long time of overloading the brain with opiate chemicals, the brain stops producing the natural chemicals that opiates replaced — when the person stops using heroin or morphine or Oxycontin or whatever opiate they’re using the brain doesn’t automatically start producing chemicals — it waits, so to speak, to see if more opiates are coming. This time between stopping the opiate use and the brain producing natural chemicals is the withdrawal time. The absence of these brain chemicals causes all sorts of physical complications, most of them painful. This is from MedlinePlus/ The National Institutes of Health:

Early symptoms of withdrawal include:

• Agitation
• Anxiety
• Muscle aches
• Increased tearing
• Insomnia
• Runny nose
• Sweating
• Yawning

Late symptoms of withdrawal include:

• Abdominal cramping
• Diarrhea
• Dilated pupils
• Goose bumps
• Nausea
• Vomiting

Opioid withdrawal reactions are very uncomfortable but are not life-threatening. Symptoms usually start within 12 hours of last heroin usage and within 30 hours of last methadone exposure.

One symptom they left out is craving. They’re listing physical symptoms that are obvious, but craving is hard to describe, and this is the painful sense that something vital is missing — it drives addicts to return to the drug. Although new drugs like Suboxone help with withdrawals and make detox much, much easier, there’s a danger of becoming addicted to the cure. A good plan must be in place to withdraw gradually from the Suboxone at the right time determined by a physician trained in addiction medicine. Too often the person addicted to opiates gets help with the withdrawals but doesn’t receive the treatment necessary to deal with complications of addiction that linger even after  opiates are removed from the body. What usually happens is that later down the road when the ugliness of addiction fades in the person’s mind, the old opiate using mindset takes over for one reason or another and the person returns to opiates. It could be as simple as being with a group of people who use opiates and the person who’s been off opiates for a year is drinking alcohol so her thinking is impaired — someone in the group offers her heroin, and her impaired judgment only allows euphoric recall of how great the heroin felt — this person is at risk of relapse. It can happen in a flash if the person hasn’t received treatment and is not managing their recovery long term.