Category: Australia

You pass so many people on the streets each day, without realizing how many of them are struggling with hardships and what they have going on in their lives. Someone is overjoyed because he just found out his wife is expecting a baby. Someone is miserable because their ice-cream fell on the pavement. Some have urgent cravings of injecting heroin in their veins just so the cold-sweats and cramping would stop. None of these things may be immediately apparent, but they are there.

Every addict has to go through a lot of hoops on their way to sobriety. They struggle with social stigmas, personal demons and general ignorance from people who think addiction is just a weak personality trait. Let’s have a look, at some hard truths and open pleas of understanding from recovering addicts.

Moving on

When a person becomes addicted, it can be for many reasons or even combination of circumstances. One thing we know for a fact is that human beings are social creatures. We seek acceptance and like-minded individuals to spend our time with. Addicts are no different, human after all, they seek other addicts who will not judge their use and will understand the hardships they go through. When it’s time to step off the train of self-destruction, distancing himself from people that influence, remind or even impose drug use is one of the first steps towards recovery.

It’s a slippery slope

Every recovered addict has gone through or seriously considered relapsing. The path to sobriety is slick and treacherous. Just because a person is physically sober, does not magically remove all the triggers and reasons that moved him to use in the first place. Mental addiction is much harder to treat than physical addiction. Slipping back into the comforts of drugs and alcohol happens, there is no way around it. Regardless of how many months or even years have passed, that next hit and the feeling of relief it used to bring is forever at the back of their minds.

Short term goals – long term success

It is important that an addict has goals and a track record of their previous achievements. Short term goals bring gratification and sense of accomplishment once achieved. This is necessary through the depressing and cold slog through the recovery process. Keeping track of your merits and achieved goals is just as important to have a new one just around the corner. Be it sobriety of 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 months, each minute counts and is a success on its own.

Support

Addiction is hard enough to kick, even harder if there is no one supporting you. Addicts on their path to sobriety need constant emotional and physical support. Become their confidant, listen and offer advice or insight when necessary. Be their work-out partner, give them a ride to the support group meetings, become their sponsor. As was mentioned earlier, humans are social creatures, therefore overcoming hardships come a lot easier in a group and with the support of family and friends.

Statistical demoralization

Statistics are just numbers, cold facts, rarely disputed or argued with. Lifeless and emotionless tally of one thing or another. Comes as no surprise that no person likes to be called a statistic. We are all part of some kind of statistic, be it voter consensus or your local library attendance rate. Somehow there still exists a stigma of being a part of addiction statistic. Being called a statistic is implying that whatever hardship an addict is going through, it’s not that important since there are thousands upon thousands going through the same issues. Just because something is widespread and well-known does not make it any less hard to beat or deems any less support from the society. Stop labeling addicts, they are real people.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Addicts are more often than not depressed and miserable beings. Cold and withdrawn, in emotional or physical pain, recoiling at every offer to help them. It’s easy to give up and abandon all your support for them, thinking that they just don’t appreciate it or even worse – they are a lost cause and nothing will bring that original personality back. It could not be further from the truth. Any person can turn their lives around in a very short time and with the right support, therapy and mindset, anything is possible. Addicts are not hopeless, they have dreams and aspirations that they think of every day. An addiction is not an immediate death of a person, they are still there, the same person you befriended or fell in love with so many years ago, they just need help clawing their way back up to the surface.

 

Be engaged in your recovering friends and family members lives. Be their trusted support and pillar, their walking stick they can lean on when the going gets tough. Most important of all, don’t presume – communicate and make your decisions educated.

When a friend or a friend is in need, for most people, first course of action is to help and support them. It’s an unwritten law – friends and family stand by each other through thick and thin. Finding out that a friend or a loved one is suffering from addiction is as thin as it gets.

A well-known fact is that addiction is a tough guest to deal with. No one disputes it, even if they themselves have never had the misfortune to be addicted themselves or even been in contact with someone who has. We all know its hard, it’s taxing, its draining and very depressing. So we try to help. We do everything, to the best of our abilities to help the addict deal with his daily struggles fighting an addiction. Yet we should weigh both positives and negatives when it comes to helping someone with an addiction. Too many people enable addicts to continue their unhealthy fixation on their drug of choice, sometimes perpetuating the addiction itself. They mean the best for the addict, always with an intent to help, but there are a few things that people help addicts with, that actually contribute to the addiction and are extremely detrimental to a full recovery.

Elephant in the room

Often people will try to avoid topics that mention or contribute to addiction or drug use when an addict is present. Even if the addict is at risk at losing his cool and becoming angry during a conversation about addiction, simply ignoring the fact is not going to make it go away. Walking on eggshells when an addict is around will just make him feel like he has some contagious disease and often results in self-pity and continued drug use.

Claiming addiction is just a phase

That is the general approach to a great many parents when they find out their teenage son or daughter is using and abusing drugs. An addiction is not something a person can “grow out of” or “get over”. Addiction does not simply go away after a certain milestone is reached, don’t fool yourselves.

Covering for the addict

A severely hung-over addict that is going through withdrawal symptoms may not be able to go to work or school, so the first thing most loved ones do is cover for them. Calling in work or school to cover for them may save them from flunking their subject or getting fired in the short run, but it is very counter-productive for the addict. Facing hard truths and realities is a lesson that is much more important at that point in time than a satisfactory grade at school or a happy boss.

Financing their lifestyle

When an addict approaches their friends or family for a hand-out or a loan, odds are that money will never go towards groceries, education, gas or whatever else reason was cited during their plea. It goes straight to their dealer, who is more than happy to take that money from you. Addicts will do most anything to chase their next high. Bad, immoral and illegal things. Lying about where that money will go is definitely on the tame side of this spectrum.

Catering for their mess

Dirty laundry, broken needles and empty dime bags in every corner. A typical scene for an addict, one that is hard to stomach for moms, dads and friends everywhere. Cleaning an addicts mess may help him cheer up, but it does nothing to further their path to sobriety. An addict has an addictive personality, so when all their mess is cleaned up for them, after a while it becomes a norm and they begin to rely on that. The addict needs to face the consequences of their addiction.

Tough love

Being a close friend to an addict or even a family member, it is important to remember that addict became an addict because he had little self-control and became dependent on one substance or another. Likewise, good deeds and a helping hand can enable the addict to stay in the ditch, instead of pulling him out. Appealing to a basic human decency does not work when it comes to addiction, and that should not be held against the addict either. The craving and voices that go through an addicts head is beyond that, it transcends social norms and established truths. When an addict needs, he needs, no matter what. A bit of tough love can go a long way.

An addict will gamble, sell and trade everything they have to get their next hit – their dignity, their wealth, their community, their job, their friends and anything in between. It’s a deep fall from being sober to a full blown addiction. It happens very quickly, but along the way it’s easy to lose everything, most of all – perspective. Most addicts will tell you, it’s not the lost cars or houses that keep them up at night. It’s the lost opportunities, friendships, relationships. The hardest part of any addicts recovery is stepping up and admitting their flaws and mistakes to the people they care for the most. A big majority of addicts began using just to avoid these kind of confrontations and emotional pain in the first place. To become a functional member of our society an addict must learn ways to communicate with their peers and loved ones alike.

Communication skills

Effective recovery process can go only so far with physical and mental self-conditioning. An addict will almost never reach sobriety again without support and care from people around them. It doesn’t even have to be friends or loved ones, not at first anyway, that part comes later. First things first, as they say, so learning how to convey and communicate a thought, an emotion or a feeling is very important.

Learn to listen

An addict has probably heard extremely “useful tips” from people around them for years. Do this, do that. Just stop. Just don’t. Nothing annoys and pushes away a highly depressed addict more than some happy-go-lucky chump to tell them “Just stop using and cheer up!”. Learning to phase out this “white noise” is the very first thing they learn to do, since according to an addict, he is not addicted so all these nonsense recommendations are unwarranted and unnecessary. Until they are.Being able to step back and actually listen to what a person has to say can be very difficult for an addict. Years of practice ignoring people can be a hard habit to break.

Take yourself out of the equation

Chasing the high can take a lot of things out of perspective. When the craving sets in and the addict begins to come down, nothing but the hunt remains. They need it, and they need it now. Their entire focus turns to themselves and their personal needs and gains. Addicts are selfish beings, the very nature of addiction ensures that. For an addict, the world revolves around them and their next hit. This is not true, however, the world does not care for an addicts struggle and continues spinning regardless. It can be very daunting and troubling experience to re-learn the basics of living in a community, learning how to be a part of something more than a sum of its components. Empathy and care for other people and their opinions are very necessary skills to learn when returning to the sober world.

Meet them halfway

Working in a team, rather than a single unit. That is something new to most addicts. Being able to meet people half-way and compromise on difficult topics is essential for successful re-integration into society and building normal relationships. Most addicts have understood that not everything goes the way they want a long time ago. Being beaten into the mud by their addiction, again and again, has a very humbling effect, so when an addict doesn’t particularly care about feelings and needs of people around them it’s not done out of malice or deliberate hate. They are just used to the idea that no one gets what they want, life is unfair and there is nothing that can be done about it. Teaching an addict that by simple acts of kindness and self-sacrifice a group of people can prosper and flourish much faster than a lone-wolf approach to life.

Restore your core values

Addicts rarely have the luxuries of silk sheets and gourmet chefs cooking for them. They lack most of basic needs that we consider necessities. A shelter and a hot meal often take a back-seat to an opportunity to get high. Addicts will do a long list of self-compromising and downright degrading things just to get their drug of choice, a good meal or a comfortable nights sleep. Prostitution, lying, stealing and cheating to name a few. A recovering addict needs to re-establish boundaries that will never be crossed again. A pillar of core beliefs that are honorable and just, standing for something that provides character integrity is an important step to recovery and rebuilding your relationships with friends and loved ones.

Communicating with your addiction

These skills will be a cornerstone in a recovering addicts life to come. They will ensure that rehabilitation process is carried out without blockers, smooth and as quickly and efficiently as possible. The very same communication skills will also allow them to be honest with themselves and people around them. These skills will allow them to say no to drugs, alcohol, and other addictive behaviors.

Being an individual is important. Being an individual that is able to co-exist and cooperate with other individuals is paramount. To break out of this self-imposed prison, communication is key.

Almost everyone imagines a drug addict as a homeless, dirty bum tweaking and shivering under a bridge somewhere. That could not be further from the truth.

Addiction, whatever the substance, does not separate us in genders, income brackets, nationalities or age groups. Addiction is a very real issue for everyone, regardless of your place of location, a mansion in Beverly Hills or under a storm drain bridge. Financially comfortable people are affected by drug-related issues just as much, if not more. Wealthy individuals encounter stress, genetic predisposition to addiction and mental illness just as much as anyone else. That said, there are a few things that make them more prone to drug abuse than your average homeless person.

Money to waste

The most obvious reason is the ready access to large amounts of money. Drugs are not cheap, neither is an addiction to them, so having a six digit bank account can help a desperate addict fuel their cravings that much more. Where a poor addict might be forced to resort to crime or other embarrassing and frowned upon activities like prostitution just to score the next hit, a wealthy person can buy all the coke, heroin or any other drug in bulk if he wanted to. This ease of access makes it very easy to go off rails and straight into the abyss. Any addict out there will tell you, having an unlimited supply of their choice of drug would lead them to the grave sooner than later. Being wealthy opens a lot of doors, even those that should remain closed.

Self-imposed guilt

Feeling guilty about their wealth is a common occurrence. Especially for those who are born in wealthy families, all that money just given to them. They feel guilty that they have this fancy and privileged life, while there are countless people struggling to feed their families and keep their heads above water. Many will dispute the validity of such guilt, but the fact of the matter is that it does not matter what is a person guilty of, what matters is, that the guilt is there and it can manifest from any number of reasons. A person feeling guilty, regardless of reasons, can be very susceptible to depression and self-harm. Anything that makes them feel better is welcomed, and in combination with the aforementioned expendable income, it’s a fast-lane to addiction.

Self-entitlement

The complete polar opposite of feeling guilt, there are many out there that feel entitled and better than the rest of us. Being rich it’s easy to fall into this way of thinking. Often children grow up being always told that they are better than everyone else because they have opportunities, fortune and connections that most people don’t. Never experiencing the need to work a day in their lives, they grow up feeling like they don’t need to earn their money and others do it for them, that the world and other people “below” their standard, owes them something. This sense of entitlement is oddly enough, not exclusive to wealthy individuals. There are people who live all their lives on welfare and social support, therefore never needing to work hard for their rewards. Therefore both rich and poor can fall for this self-entitlement and are just as prone to addiction as each other.

Get out of jail free card

There is an untold number of wealthy people who believe that the laws are not written for them. That they are somehow above the law. Plenty of disposable income for bribes and influential connections that life in luxury provides makes them feel that whatever they do, it’s not wrong because they can afford it. Being able to afford an expensive lawyer in case of being caught red-handed or being able to pay bail whatever the amount, means they can do whatever they want. The law is also regrettably very biased. Being pulled over for a routine check-up, a person in an Italian sports car is less likely to be searched and bothered with questions than a regular Joe driving a van from his 9-5 workplace. It’s sad, unfair and, unfortunately, very true. Having this proverbial “get out of jail free card” in their pocket, wealthy individuals feel like they are less likely to be charged for engaging in criminal activities.

Addiction does not discriminate. People of all walks of life have been affected by addiction, regardless of their income or socioeconomic status. Many heroin addicts today attribute their fall into addiction to prescription medication. Why you may ask? They say it’s because it was so easy to get their drugs, they just had to go to a pharmacy and get a refill. Being wealthy and with virtually unlimited funds to spend, is like having a prescription for any drug at any time. In the end of the day, both rich and poor find themselves at the same place. A place and time in their lives where they need to make a decision – continue down the path of certain death or seek professional help and turn their lives around in a rehabilitation center.

Young people are rebels, it’s a well-known fact. They love to “stand up to the system” and try new things or blatantly disregard others. Teenagers rarely have the finances and connections required to actively produce and/or use a hard drug. So it’s no wonder that Marijuana has been the choice of drug for most of them as it is considered to be the lightest and least damaging of all openly illegal drugs today. However, the path of least resistance will always be the most traveled. As such, a rise in legal highs has spread across the world. Favored by aforementioned young adults and teenagers, these drugs took off at an exponential rate. It was not long until people woke up to the fact that synthetic marijuana, also known as “spice” was indeed highly addictive, unhealthy and equally destructive on both mind and the body.

Introducing “Kratom”. What is it? And why should you care? Kratom is extracted from a plant native to South East Asia, specifically Thailand as its country of origin.  It’s called mitragyna speciosa and comes from rubiaceae plant family, same as the coffee bean tree. Thai people have been using this plant and its strange contradicting properties in folk medicine for hundreds of years. Why contradicting? In small doses, kratom acts as a stimulant, much like coffee – a distant cousin of kratom plant. It was first used by farmers and laborers as they believed it gave them energy and vigor necessary to perform hard manual activities. In larger doses, the very same plant has the opposite effect. It becomes a relaxant and induces euphoria, calmness and a general feeling of being high, not that much different from the high achieved from other relaxant drugs like marijuana, for example.

Is kratom Illegal?

Oddly, it is not. Anyone in most countries of the world can legally purchase and use it as a recreational drug. Its legality is the main reason why it is sweeping over the world as the new choice of drug. It’s legal, it’s cheap, it’s effective. Note that it is legal in most countries, but not all. Rather fitting, that the first country to outlaw this drug was the very origin country kratom plant – Thailand. In 1943 a Kratom Act was set in motion that outlawed the use, growth and sale of this drug. Slowly nearby countries joined this legislation and Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and some European countries began their movement towards controlling or making the drug illegal outright. Denmark, Latvia, Romania, Sweden, Lithuania and Poland passed kratom as a controlled drug at 2011. The United States are in process in joining this way of thinking, but for the time being, it is very much legal to buy and consume kratom for both medical and recreational purposes.

What’s the big deal?

Kratom has many different forms of product. It can be dried, crushed and consumed in capsules or pills. It can be chewed raw both fresh and dried, much like the Thai field workers did back in the day. It can also be made into a tea, by boiling the leaves and pulp of the kratom plant. Whichever way one consumes it, the results are always the same, albeit with varying forms of potency. Many claim it is not addictive, but the ever-rising popularity of this old but rediscovered drug points to the contrary. Regular and chronic consumption of kratom have adverse side-effects and repercussions. They include but are not limited to:

• Anxiety
• Constipation
• Stomach cramps
• Psychotic outbursts
• Respiratory complications
• Loss of appetite
• Delusions
• Nausea and vomiting
• Heightened aggression
• Skin rashes

There is help

For those who believe their kratom use has gone from a novelty into a problem that is affecting you both socially and physically, an inpatient rehabilitation program is the help you need. Open legality of this dangerous drug makes it very easy and the general population of the world very susceptible to its side-effects. Inpatient programs ensure that an addict has no access to the drug. If you or anyone you know is suffering from kratom addiction or experiencing two or more side-effects listed above, please seek professional help as soon as possible as these side effects have a long lasting impact on the addict’s life.