CO-DEPENDENCE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO DEPENDENCE ON DRUGS

If you have read other of my hubs you will know that I am a long term drug addict.

Much has been written on this subject, but not so much on why it is so difficult to get out of it.

Thinking about the reasons for the rarity of getting and staying clean, I came up with these few thoughts.

1. You need to be able to cope with loneliness as well as your own company.

Generally speaking you will no longer have any non -using friends. This is because you are ashamed of yourself, you no longer have much in common, they have moved forward with their lives, sadly you have not.

2. Lack of money

Generalising again you will not have much money, 90% of this you will spend on drugs , finding them, fetching them in taxis and of course paying for them. The other 10% you may spend on food if you are on top of your habit.

As a result you never go out, visit the cinema, see bands, buy clothes or have teeth. This does not endear you to your old, clean friends, you are a nuiscance and an embarassment to them as a rule, and well just plain boring to be with; specially if you spend most of your free time in the bathroom sticking needles into your self, or dressing your smelly ulcers.

Its easy to see how this links in with co-dependence in your significant relationships, if you have any.

In the same way that when you break up from a long relationship, you will long to see the loved one, however much you know they are bad for you, so, when you give up drugs, really they are the thing you most long to have with you. It IS hard to give up the very things that bring you instant gratification or relief from physical distress.

So imagine the difficulty of giving up both at the same time. Oh the longing, the misery, the complete sense of mental and physical instability, the fear of lonlinesss, the fear of never feeling well again, well frankly it is all virtually unbearable.

If giving up drugs was easy 98% of users would do it. If giving up drugs was horrible but bearable, 75% of users would get clean. I quess that is why virtually none of us can manage to do it.

It is hard to feel positive when you feel like death warmed up, live in a grotty place, see no decent people, cry all the time, lie awake night and day for maybe 14-20 days, and feel too delicate to bathe let alone wash your clothes and hair.

A futher and little known difficulty is that , if you do have a drug worker and a legal script, you will have to fight like hell to reduce it let alone stop it. Your confidence will have been so undermined by your workers continued confirmation that you are already a no good , chaotic failure, that the mere suggesting of stopping the methadone that keeps you off of illicit drugs (this is completely untrue by the way, all scripted users use illicitly on top when they can) will be greeted with pure horror. ' Oh have your really thought it through? you are so much more stable and so much less trouble to society, when your drinking 100 ml of methadone every day, and walking to the chemist's every day is so good for you, specially the daily humiliation you. will feel standing in a specially marked out place, away from decent people, day after day." they will say.

Also, think on if we all got clean WHAT WOULD ALL THE THOUSANDS OF DRUG WORKERS DO FOR A JOB? Well, I guess they would be unemployed, in debt , lose their houses and cars would not be able to dress themselves and their kids at Next, and would probably end up in a 'bad place', with a broken marriage no job prospects and well they might have to turn to DRUGS just to keep them stable , calm and 'out of trouble'; you know how upsetting all this can be!

This is to say nothing of the plight of the poor pharmacists, their income would be decimated. They get paid so much more for filling all those daily blue scripts, than the monthly green ones that normal people are given.

Possibly we would also be responsible for Boots going under, since they don't just dispense the damned stuff they make it as well!. Well, I would just feel so bad at putting all these peoples jobs at risk, I think it would be better for society if I just carried on as normal and stopped causing everyone so much trouble. Truly, I have been begging for rehab or even a 2ml a week reduction for the last year, it has made me so unstable that there has been no option but to double my Methadone script, and just to make sure I don't "kick off" about this complete refusal of my request I was put on 25mg of diazepam a day (that's a lot if you don't know), just to keep me calm and stable and unchaotic and completely addicted to yet another drug , don't you know. They are so thoughtful and caring that they did give me a daily prescription of dexamphetamine (70 ml per day), to make sure I wasn't too drowsy, what with the alcohol and all. Perhaps they just want me dead, after all I am 53, a drain on the economy and, well, pretty damned useless altogether. If I die , the government licenced drug dealers, who look after me, will soon find anotrher 18 year old to peddle their wares to, for the rest of their miserable lives.