The Write Thought: disease?

Re: disease?

Heroin has a strange effect on the brain. This is my layman’s understanding: Normally your brain produces a chemical called endorphins; this chemical is what gives us that euphoric feeling after a great work out, or after really good sex. It also happens to help with pain, and it can affect your mood, etc, etc. The chemical is transmitted to receptor sites (think of a baseball glove, and endorphins are the ball). When you introduce opiates into your body (i.e. heroin, oxy’s, even prescription pain killers) for an extended period of time, these “foreign” chemicals fill the same receptor sites that your body normally fills with endorphins. After an extended period of use, the brain stops or extremely reduces producing endorphins, the brain thinks there is an excess of endorphins since the receptor sites are being filled artificially. So when you stop using there is nothing to fill these receptor sites, and your body freaks out.

Someone correct me if I am wrong.

Regarding addiction as a disease; I am of a mind that addiction is in fact a disease. The drug addiction is a symptom of the disease (including alcohol). I believe that once a person who has this disease takes that first drug, it then triggers a reaction within the user, and the disease then progresses. It progresses at different rates for different people. But it is the one thing that separates us (addicts) from normal people who can drink socially, use recreationally without ever reaching skimming the depths an addict does. I do not know if there is a genetic link regarding the disease. I suppose that it is like any other disease, some are genetic, some aren’t. But the fact that it is a disease gives me hope (and I suppose that here is where I will get flack from other addicts), but if it is a disease, that means one day they will be able to isolate the gene which causes the disease, and once they are able to do that, they will be able to find a cure.

Ha, how is that for optimism? This doesn’t mean that I think that I or any other addict suffering from the disease of addiction should sit back and wait for the cure. We have to use what we have at our disposal. In fact there is a way to recover from the disease. It says so right in the AA Big Book, people have and do recover from the disease of addiction. It’s a matter of what you want for yourself once the drugs are removed from your system. If you are content with simply not using, that’s fine. If you are like me, and the wreckage of your disease causes you great amounts of pain and guilt. If you are left with not really knowing how to live or feel without the use of drugs, then you will probably reach a point where that pain is no longer tolerable and you will seek out some kind of help. My experience in the past, my only experience with extended sobriety, and 3 years out of an adult life time is not a real extended amount of time, but after working a 12 step program, I lived more in those 3 years than I have my entire adult lifetime.

Eventually I will reach that threshold again. The one where sitting on my ass suffering from a disease that I no longer have the luxury of supporting through the use of drugs, when it gets to be too painful, too annoying, too much to handle, that eventually I will return to the 12 step program, and I mean more than hitting a meeting once in a while.