Thread: am i clean ?
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Old 04-04-2013, 04:06 PM
  # 3 (permalink)  
SLD
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Posts: 65
Hurrah for both of you! Yes you are "clean". This is my pet annoyance with subs and recovery, these terms dirty and clean. They project a false mental image of ourselves.

The standard view - if you use anything, you are dirty; filthy, evil, vile, low. If you need nothing, you are clean; white, angelic, fresh, perfection.

Is the diabetic "dirty" because he injects insulin? Is your neighbor dirty because without his pills he'd drop dead of a heart arrythmia? Of course not. Suboxone is a medicine we need to function, just like the diabetic needs insulin to function.

And I am convinced that opioid addiction isn't something we elect to do so much as we discover it corrects something missing in our brains - a lack of natural "feel good" neurochemicals like dopamine nd endorphins. Some of us lack these, and the first vicoden we take, we discover what other people feel like every day. We feel good; normal. And the desire to recapture that feeling is immensely powerful.

This is why "normal" people can run through 60 vics for an auto accident and not think twice about stopping, while another will be addicted in 2 weeks.

^^ All this is opinion, of course. I never abused any drug until I was nearly 40 years old, and then I discovered (and self-medicated) opioids because they removed me from a depressive hell that I had been in my whole life.
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