Author: tearj3rker
Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 8:58 pm
Congratulations on the wedding Christinen! That’s huge, and I wish you both really well. This is a time to be enjoying the wedding planning with your mum & the girls while your fiance escapes to the football. Enjoy it. Less worrying more excitement I say.
With the Suboxone is trading one drug for another idea… I agree that is one way of looking at it. But at the same time, if I swapped a dealer my drug of choice, and got given Suboxone, I’d consider myself ripped off. Giving an addict Suboxone is like taking the beer off an alcoholic’s hand, and telling him he has to drink light beer from now on. It’s a pretty shit trade, unless that addict actually wants to improve themselves and get better. Then it’s a step in the right direction. Your fiance has chosen to drink the light beer to try and improve himself because he’s acknowledged that what he was doing before was damaging himself and his family. That takes a degree of commitment.
There’s a lot of controversy as to whether Suboxone is trading one addiction for another. And it’s understandable that the layperson would view opioid replacement therapy is exactly that. After all it’s true that Suboxone and methadone have potential for addiction. As an example – when a person’s prescribed morphine for a hip-replacement, and uses it as prescribed for pain, they’re not addicted, even if they had some mild physical withdrawal when they stopped taking it. When that person decides to take more than prescribed because it made them feel good, that would be abusing their morphine, and would IMO cross over into the realm of addiction.
Same goes for Suboxone & methadone. When a person takes them as prescribed and doesn’t abuse them for how it makes them feel, IMO they’re not addicted. But when a person takes more, or snorts / injects their dose, or mixes it with other drugs to try and get an effect, IMO that’s addiction.
The reason people get switched to Suboxone & methadone is because, for the most part, there’s less reward if a person chooses to abuse them. They’re like the nicotine patches of the opioid world. You can’t exactly use them as easily for relief when life stresses you out. Especially with Suboxone, because it’s more like ‘bud light’, there’s not much point in taking heaps, because the rewards are so little.
It’s important he acknowledges that he will always have a weakness for drugs, and he won’t ever be able to use them again manageably. Some people call themselves addicts for life to remember this, others just put up a big mental note that says "stay away from that stuff", and keep reinforcing their recovery … literally until they reach the grave, if they want a long happy life.
I agree with everyone else that this may not be a good time for him to reduce and jump off Suboxone, given weddings can be quite stressful and it’s a period of great change in both your lives. It’s important not to be under too much stress in the early post-Suboxone period, as people are vulnerable to relapse. It would be best to wait until things have settled down after the wedding & honeymoon.
Congrats again.