Painkiller Addiction

Painkillers, once prescribed, all too often open the door to tenacious addiction and dependency. In the U.S. alone over 15 million people have abused prescription drugs with more than 2 million of these being teenagers. Most teenagers using painkillers to get high assume they are safer than street drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Doctors and drug rehab professionals report painkiller addiction as one of the most difficult addictions to treat, the most serious being opiods. These are opium like compounds which interfere with the human nervous system as well as artificially stimulating portions of the brain. Painkiller addiction results in mental as well as physical addiction as well as increasing tolerance where higher and higher doses of the painkiller are craved in an effort to ease the addiction Narconon Arrowhead has one of the highest success rates in handling painkiller addiction to a full and lasting resolution.

Many people and even professionals hold the opinion that marijuana is not addictive. This is simply a misunderstanding and not true. Marijuana addiction, especially on a mental or emotional level has been on the increase in terms of numbers and severity for some time. The potency of marijuana such as Canadian ‘BC Bud’ and hydroponically engineered pot is many times that of the marijuana of past days. Inability of users to control their use of this substance and Narconon Arrowhead statistics show a steady increase in the number of program participants with marijuana as their main drug of abuse and addiction.

A rehab program should be a series of steps done in sequence to gradually increase a person’s mental, emotional, and physical health. This involves a full and complete handling of cravings, guilt and depression that accompany any addiction and addictive lifestyle. These are also the major sources of continued drug use and relapse. The program would also include an increase in skills and abilities that will be needed for the restoring of relationships, trust, finances, career, hopes and dreams. All this is not only possible but is being achieved on a daily basis at Narconon Arrowhead. Our 76% success rate when compared to 16-20% for more traditional short term programs speaks for itself.

Substance abuse generally starts with an attempt to handle pain. This could me mental or physical pain and does not necessarily need to be great. A teenager uses drugs for the first time and finds they helped with shyness and so uses them more and more often, as a false solution to the pains of adolescence. A mother finds relief from family stress with anti-depressants and so continues their use and even increases the dosages. Physical pain is relieved with prescription painkillers and so they are continued more and more frequently. All of these substances have their own particular side-effects which create new situations and new sources of mental and physical pain, and so other substances are now used in an attempt to handle these new pains. Thus most of those entering substance abuse treatment find themselves having problems with not just one substance but multiple substances. Narconon Arrowhead aids the individual in confronting and resolving the use of these substances as well as dealing with the underlying mental and physical pains which resulted in the original and now continued abuse.

A substance abuse rehab should probably be more correctly labeled a Substance(s) abuse rehab. The individual has what is called his drug of choice or primary addiction. Rarely in this day and age does someone come for addiction treatment without having several substances needing to be addressed. Alcohol abuse is quite commonly mixed with other drugs of abuse such as heroin, cocaine, or meth, to mention only a few. Prescription drug abuse is beginning to take on epidemic proportions in the country and throughout the world. Painkillers, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics are showing up more and more as drugs abused along with street drugs, but are also showing a major increase as being the drug of choice or primary addiction. These substances can build up tolerance in the system quickly and many have life threatening side effects. Multiple drug abuse rehabilitation has become the order of the day.