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Opiate Drug Addiction

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Anyone who has ever suffered an illness or serious injury has the potential to become addicted to opiate painkillers. There are also people out there who experiment with street drugs like heroin and have the potential to become addicted. Opiate drugs flood the brain with "feel-good" chemicals and if you keep taking them every day and develop tolerance to them, then eventually you will need to take opiate drugs just to feel normal and avoid being sick. Not taking the medication and feeling the onset of these uncomfortable feelings is known as withdrawal.

So what typically happens when the opiate addict encounters these feelings of withdrawal is that they will run back to their drug of choice and start using again. This makes it very difficult to break out of the cycle of addictive using and get back to any sort of normal life. This is further complicated if people have chronic pain issues that they are trying to deal with while avoiding the use of opiates. In many cases they will need to find alternative ways to deal with their pain if they want to have any chance of ever getting off of the opiates. Not finding ways to deal with this type of chronic pain is how oxycontin addiction and percocet addiction can end up developing. Taking these opiate medications every day can lead to dependence in some people and some of those who develop dependence will also develop full blown addiction. Once you are addicted to opiates you can probably never go back to taking them safely again without the risk of increasing your tolerance and being drawn back into addictive using. The solution for many people who develop full blown opiate addiction is to go to a treatment center and get detoxed from the medication. This is generally not as uncomfortable as most people anticipate because the medical staff at the rehab will usually give you medicine in order to treat your detox symptoms. Of course this is nice but it is also very expensive, and many drug addicts will not be able to afford treatment like this. Some will have insurance but many will not, and even those with insurance will not necessarily be able to afford the copay. As such, many opiate addicts will end up trying to detox themselves at home on their couch, usually with less than great results. There are actually other options for treating opiate addiction, such as ultra rapid detox or drug therapy, but each of these is probably more expensive then a trip to drug rehab. The best solution for most people is to try and scrape together funding for rehab after they have made the genuine decision to stop using drugs.