Heroin addiction is a difficult subject for me for personal reasons...in fact, I am currently on state probation for possession of it in 4 years ago.<p>I become addicted to numb the pain of my mother's passing and my 13 year marriage ending, although there is, of course, no excuse.<p>It started with prescribed Oxycontin and progressed from there. "Why buy overpriced synthetic molecules designed not to really get you high when you can get the natural ones cheaper and feel better?" I can still remember my engineering-mind thinking.<p>I have been off it now for about 3 years after getting clean, literally, on a cell floor in a county jail...cold turkey...the first time I ever successfully kicked it. After that, I checked myself into a South Florida inpatient rehab (called the Hanley Center...please, do yourself a favor and give them a call if you need help), and with the help of some amazing people, got better.<p>I'm convinced the only reason I finally kicked was simply because there was no other option; jails have pretty much no supply of heroin. To this day I thank the stars for that county jail...it saved my life.<p>The best way to summarize the experience was with a "joke" (it was no joke BTW) I came up with to try to explain how I felt near the end...<p><i>What's the best thing about heroin?</i> After you do it, you don't feel anything.<p><i>What's the worse thing about heroin?</i> After you do it, you don't feel anything.
The last two sentences are fairly profound. (I didn't quite understand what she was saying until I had read it a few times.)<p><i>We think of ourselves as controlling our behavior, willing our actions into being, but it's not that simple.<p>It's as if over time, we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are.</i>
So, I have been a heroin user (addict) for a long time, about fifteen years. I have a great job, as a senior engineer in a start-up, and have worked almost continually in IT while maintianing my habit. I've tried to quit, several times, and found it incredibly hard.<p>As the article sugests, a change of scenery really does help, though. So, when I've been working overseas, or travelling to speak at conferences, then I find it's <i>much</i> easier to stop. I would take some methadone with me, and wean myself gradually off using it, over only a week or two.<p>I have actually done this several times, and found that after a month I am essentially clean. However, when I return home I have always relapsed, usually pretty quickly. This is something I currently have a <i>huge</i> problem with, and I don't really know how to solve it ;( I'm trying to stop again, and wonderining if maybe a change of location would be the right way to do this properly?
I remember a famous animal study about heroin addiction with mice. Almost all mice that were in a very stressful environment and had easy access to heroin became addict. But if mice were living in a pleasurable environment, most mice would not become addict.<p>So, even if it looks very likely that the association between a habit and an environment was at work here too, I wonder how much the low relapse rate was linked not just to a change of environment, but also to a change from an incredibly stressful situation (war) to a much more satisfying one.
Unfortunately, most addicts are unable to change their circumstances drastically enough to use this technique.<p>To use an analogy from the article, a smoker can't stop going to work because walking by the entrance stirs cravings.<p>Would like to see practical tools that addicts can employ that use this theory, short of flying across the world.
It's common practice to tell addicts that they should move to another city after therapy and therapists are certainly right to do so but I think this is only a part of the truth.<p>The soldiers in vietnam were under great stress from (war) that went away when they returned to the US.
If you start doing drugs or any other coping mechanism because of some emotional problem the problem will travel with you. You can't run away, the only way to break those habits is to learn other coping mechanisms or to get to the root of your internal trauma and come to terms with it.
A related and useful article from The Economist (Link at the end). I have reproduced parts of it that I found interesting (Heavily edited for telegraphic brevity):<p>"Like many of America’s new generation of users, Ms Scudo's ddiction began in 2000 when, after a hip injury, a doctor prescribed her ... a high dose of OxyContin.. Her prescription was later reduced, but she was already hooked. On the black market OxyContin pills cost $80 each, more than she could afford to cover her six-a-day habit; so she began selling her pills and using the proceeds to buy cheaper heroin. As if from nowhere, Ms Scudo had become a heroin addict."<p>"last year 11m Americans used illicitly-acquired prescription painkillers, more than the number who used cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine and LSD combined."<p>"Though Afghanistan accounts for 80% of global opium production, America gets most of its heroin from Mexico. Mexico is now the world’s third-biggest producer of opium, after Afghanistan and Myanmar."<p>"More than half are women, and 90% are white. The drug has crept into the suburbs and the middle classes. And although users are still mainly young, the age of initiation has risen"<p><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21633819-old-sickness-has-returned-haunt-new-generation-great-american-relapse" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21633819-old-sic...</a>
The relationship between drugs and environment is so strong that (in mice, at least) you can trigger an "overdose" simply by changing the latter.<p><a href="http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/390/Siegel.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/390/Siegel.pdf</a>
It reminds me of "Going to Chicago", an evocative blues about heroin addiction, habits, and place, sung by the great singer Joe Williams: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPcHVqKHkKo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPcHVqKHkKo</a><p>In the intro to the song, he sets up the background: "He had a woman with a heroin habit, a monkey woman, a monkey on her back...so he got some fresh money and said, I'm going to take another city..."
This could be useful for informing addiction recovery within institutionalized individuals, such as soldiers or prisoners, but not within the general public. The addict is unlikely to change their entire life structure to defeat the addiction since they know that would defeat the addiction, and that's not what the addiction wants.
A few years back I came across some emails from the previous user of a computer I was given. (They really should have wiped the hard drive...) They were messages to his family back in India. The guy had been using heroin, and had kicked it once or twice. But he fell back into it, and it was when his old friends rolled into town. That was the trigger for him.
I've had similar experiences with cigarettes. I've stopped and then decided to start several times. I've found the easiest way to quit, which makes it so simple but I don't even have to think about it, is to dramatically change my circumstances and daily habits, like a new job, new roommates, or moving.
Interesting to think about the obstacles we unintentionally set in place for ourselves in living out our good intentions. Emphasizes the need for living with mindfulness.