Heroin Addiction

With regular heroin use, tolerance develops. This means the abuser must use more heroin to achieve the same intensity or effect. As higher doses are used over time, physical dependence and addiction develop. With physical dependence, the body has adapted to the presence of the drug and withdrawal symptoms may occur if use is reduced or stopped. Withdrawal, which in regular abusers may occur as early as a few hours after the last administration, produces drug craving, restlessness, muscle and bone pain, insomnia, diarrhea and vomiting, cold flashes with goose bumps (‘old turkey’), kicking movements (‘kicking the habit’), and other symptoms. Major withdrawal symptoms peak between 48 and 72 hours after the last dose and subside after about a week. Sudden withdrawal by heavily dependent users who are in poor health is occasionally fatal, although heroin withdrawal is considered much less dangerous than alcohol or barbiturate withdrawal.

Drug and alcohol rehab is an important and vital tool whether is be for drug and alcohol abuse or drug and alcohol addiction. In life there is a very thin line between abuse and addiction. Abuse is using drugs and alcohol to the determent of personal health, family harmony and security, career, and a host of other factors. Addiction is simply one more step that takes the individual over the line to a world where the drugs alcohol now controls his or her actions and motivations. Acquiring and using drugs and alcohol has taken on the color of a full time occupation. A competent and effective drug and alcohol rehab has the ability to confront and handle both abuse and addiction. One need not totally hit bottom before treatment is sought. The problem with hitting bottom first is that it often kills on upon impact.

Substance abuse generally starts with an attempt to handle pain. This could me mental or physical pain and does not necessarily need to be great. A teenager uses drugs for the first time and finds they helped with shyness and so uses them more and more often, as a false solution to the pains of adolescence. A mother finds relief from family stress with anti-depressants and so continues their use and even increases the dosages. Physical pain is relieved with prescription painkillers and so they are continued more and more frequently. All of these substances have their own particular side-effects which create new situations and new sources of mental and physical pain, and so other substances are now used in an attempt to handle these new pains. Thus most of those entering substance abuse treatment find themselves having problems with not just one substance but multiple substances. Narconon Arrowhead aids the individual in confronting and resolving the use of these substances as well as dealing with the underlying mental and physical pains which resulted in the original and now continued abuse.

In many cases addiction could be considered a side effect of drug use at abusive levels. No one intends to become an addict. Addiction begins with a problem, discomfort or some form of emotional or physical pain for a person. This person is, like most people in our society, basically good. But he encounters a problem that is causing him physical or emotional pain and discomfort and for which he does not have an immediate answer. Perhaps, as a child or teenager, he has difficulty “fitting in.” Or maybe there are physical injuries such as a broken bone, a bad back or some other chronic physical condition, or the person has suffered intolerable losses in life.

Long term drug treatment is proving to be more and more effective in handling addiction and alcoholism for a lifetime. With the majority of rehab participants entering treatment with multiple drugs of abuse and addiction a long term drug treatment becomes more and more an important point in obtaining lifetime sobriety. There is also marked increase in potency of many of the drugs on the market these days to say nothing of the epidemic increase in the abuse of prescription drugs many of which have life threatening side effects. Treatment needs to be monitored not in terms of days spent in treatment but rather in terms of lasting results for a lifetime.