Heroin, Addiction, and Recovery

The degrading arc of heroin addiction is difficult to understand. This is true not only for the outsider looking in, but also for the addicts themselves. There is a hierarchy of use that can be delineated as follows there is the snorting of the drug, the smoking of the drug, and then the injecting of the drug. While those who are only smoking heroin may feel that they are still in the recreational stages of use, they may well be headed directly toward a painful heroin detox session soon enough.

The mental and physical stages of addiction are decidedly intertwined, but for the addict they are wholly separate. Most addicts, and this would include the abusers of any drug including legal and prescription intoxicants, fail to recognize their own addiction until it may be too late. They are notorious for noticing in one another, but rarely in themselves.

This has led to the now popular concept of intervention. This may or may not be beneficial. Assuredly, they are beneficial in that the friends and family of an addict will finally face up to their own complacency in the matter, but as the addict is likely to be in a high state of denial, the real help for the user may be diminished.

An addict will not seek help until they themselves feel that they truly need it. As painful as it is true, this can take far too long. Death is often the result of denial, and all the more tragic for that. Yet a junky will not change until they are good and ready to. Rehabilitation may be impossible until the need for it is accepted.

Here lies the crux of the problem an addict is not an addict until they can see themselves as such. They will disregard all information to the contrary, insisting that they have their use under some sort of control. Until a crisis is reached, and one that will have a significant impact on the individual, there may be no overt change.

It has been said that recovery will not occur until the pain of changing will become less than the pain of staying the same. Addicts are no strangers to pain, so this threshold is hard to define. So whether an addict is smoking heroin recreationally, of living a lifestyle committed to mainlining it, recovery will still necessarily come from within.