Habili-blog 6/23/18
“Band Aids”
by Jared Mayes
There’s a reason why a band aid cannot be used for a broken bone. It won’t do much right? I know when you’re little and your mom puts a band aid on your boo boo, it magically takes away all the pain, but take away the placebo effect and it’s just a little piece of tape with a tiny gauze square on it. The same goes for all the latest and greatest medically approved opiate detox drugs. They might take the edge off and add some comfortability to the process of withdrawing, but it the grand scheme of things there are always going to be underlying issues of why an individual consciously decides to inject or smoke illegal substances. Drugs like suboxone, vivitrol, and methadone all have similar effects of binding to the opiate receptors in the brain and either producing synthetic opiate synapses or blocking the receptors all together. They don’t however have any effect on an individual’s self-confidence, emotional insecurities, past trauma, or any of the other countless reasons that drug addicts choose to mentally escape from. So, what is the outcome? You have a bunch of heroin addicts running around emotionally drained with no way to get their fix and achieve that temporary vacation from their own selves. This is why we are seeing a rise of meth use with opiate addicts who have turned to these maintenance drugs as an alternative to working on their inner issues. When you take away the only thing that they know will numb them of course their going to find an alternative. I was the kind of addict who if you left on a deserted island, I would find a native berry or something to alter my mind within an hour and even fashion a pipe to smoke it with. It’s not until a person truly makes the commitment to themselves to work on their issues that they will be able to curb that little voice inside our heads telling us to self-destruct. I’m not writing this to argue the medicinal legitimacy of opiate maintenance drugs, because quite frankly if they worked for you, great! For the ones that all those drugs did was piss them off knowing they have to wait a day or two to fully feel the effects of the heroin they just bought, rip the band aid off and focus on fixing the whole self. When you take the drugs out of the equation you are still stuck with a shell of an addict full of reasons and excuses to get high again. There’s not a magic pill or elixir that can make you feel good about yourself. It’s something that comes from within and that you must work everyday to nurture and harness. It takes patience and resiliency but at the end of the day you must realize that if the easy way out yielded positive results, very few people would feel the need to turn to drugs in the first place. When you do what’s easy, your life will surely become hard. When you do what’s hard, your life ironically enough becomes easier.