This person was able to use heroin only occasionally for over 6 months, until this friend told them to use heroin to sort out the sickness.
Someone else said:
These quotes highlight the power of information, and how beliefs rather than physical discomfort create a heroin habit: Without the beliefs that the withdrawal symptoms are caused by the lack of heroin and that the way to deal with them is more heroin, people would just go to the doctor to ask for common medication, and/or ‘sleep it out’ the same way they do with a flu.
What did I learn from this:
1. People might be OK if they can take both the high and the low (the withdrawal). If they’d wait to recover from a ‘cold’ before using heroin again, they might never progress to daily use of increasing heroin amounts and ‘full-blown’ withdrawals.
2. This works very much the same as using heroin to ‘come down’ from crack:
I talked in another post how people don’t like the crack ‘come down’ and use heroin to make it feel better:
In the same way, the ‘cold turkey’ heroin withdrawal is a ‘come down’ which nobody enjoys:
So using heroin again and again makes it feel better:
The trouble is that using heroin doesn’t make it ‘go away’, but only delays (and maybe even increases?) the withdrawal most people will have to get through when they eventually ask for a detox.
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Felicia Heidebrecht * Psycholoog in Den Haag, Rijswijk & online @ Lifeinmymind 