Keys To Surviving Drug Detox

Drug Detoxification

There is perhaps no more dreaded battle in the fight against than that waged in drug detox. To be sure, drug detoxification is hardly an easy thing, and no recovery patient ever looks back fondly on the experience. But proper care at a competent drug treatment center can help ensure that the process isn't any more trying that it absolutely has to be, and there's no mistaking the fact that drug detox itself is absolutely vital to the ultimate success of drug rehab and drug recovery.

We should note at the outset that drug detox, like prescription drug detox, isn't nearly so dramatic as it's made out to be. Indeed, the popular conception of drug detox amounts to something of a dime-store horror show, a spectacle of physical agony and emotional torture grounded mostly in movies and popular TV shows. Fortunately, Hollywood very rarely manages to capture reality as it actually is, and such is the case here: Drug detoxification, when you really get down to it, isn't so unfathomably awful.

Or it doesn't have to be, anyway: not if you get help from competent doctors and caregivers at a professional drug detox facility. Yes, the symptoms of drug withdrawal are unpleasant ones, but the medical and physical therapies employed by cutting-edge drug detoxification programs can go a long way towards mitigating them, and proper drug detox care can help to ensure that a rehab patient survives the first stage of sobriety with his mind and his body entirely intact. Given the length and scope of the recovery process, such physiological and psychological health is vital to any addict's long-term health.

Remember, no drug addict ever gets sober without help, and no one beats drug addiction alone. If you want to get better, you've got to seek out help, and rapid detox or regular drug detox is an essential first step in the seeking itself: Every journey starts somewhere, after all, and there's no escaping the whiles of drug abuse without first navigating the straits of drug withdrawal. Like the old saying goes: The way to the light, in the end, has got to run straight through the darkness.

Drug Dependency and Drug Abuse

To understand the importance of drug detoxification, it's essential to first understand the nature of drug addiction itself: how drug dependency locks addicts into habitual cycles of drug abuse. The bottom line: The compulsive nature of drug use and abuse demands that a thorough drug detox period proceed any extensive drug rehab program, and effectively ensures that no addict can get sober without seeking the help of qualified rehabilitation experts.

We should be clear about this much: Drug addiction is a clinical disease. Drug abuse is not a choice, or the product of personal weakness; it's a symptom of an underlying disorder, a chronic condition which afflicts drug addicts the same way diabetes afflicts diabetics, or tumors afflict cancer patients. Drug addicts, in other words, don't use drugs because they want to, or because they will themselves to; they use drugs because they have to, and because the physiological and psychological underpinnings of drug addiction effectively force them to.

Physiological drug addiction is a function of neurochemistry: Chronic drug abuse causes physical changes in chemical pathways in the human brain, ultimately making drugs and drug chemicals essential to the “normal” processes of a drug addict's metabolism. In simpler terms, then, we can say that drug addicts need drugs to function, and survive. This in turn explains why drug detox is needed, and why alcohol detox needs to be different from cocaine detox. Drug addiction is so crippling precisely because it makes drug use and abuse instrumental to a drug addict's physiological existence.

The psychological dimension of drug addiction is equally troubling. As chronic drug abuse makes an addict physically reliant on drugs, so to do long-term drug addicts come to lean on drug abuse as the rough equivalent of a psychological crutch. The need here, of course, is an emotional one: Psychological drug addicts use drugs to help them get out of bed in the morning, and face the world during the day. Even more to the point, drug abuse becomes a mechanism by which the chronic drug addict copes with the very fact of himself; life, you might say, becomes intolerable in any context except that of a drug high.

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