“Social Opiate Use” AKA Casual Using

From time to time I get to talk to young people who have been “experimenting” with Vidodin, OxyContin, or heroin, about a concept they call “social opiate use”, also called “casual using”. What is this concept? It is the belief, a myth really, that over a period of time, maybe a long period of time, you can use pills or heroin recreationally, as long as you’re cautious about how often you use and how much you use. What is the major flaw in this thinking?  This is the flaw: This line of reasoning assumes that the heart of addiction is the physical dependence your body develops on the opiates. This is not true. In point of fact even the most long-term, entrenched opiate habit can be detoxified in 4-6 days. So the issue isn’t the physical habit. The issue is the obsession to use, the single mindedness of thinking; all driven by the emotional dependence you develop on wanting and needing that sense of ease, comfort, and complete release from fear and worry that committed users get from opiate use. This sense of cushion and armor becomes so intractable, that you loose the ability to handle life on life’s terms, and even the daily ups and downs that normal folk are able to handle –that you used to be able to handle-with a littler bit of difficulty, becomes impossible.  It starts to be all you think about. If you have a pattern of using with your friends on Saturday nights, and you never use on Fridays, after 5-6 weeks, comes Thursday night, you start saying to yourself, “hey it would be fun to get high tomorrow night and Saturday too, it’s not that big a deal”. Even if the money is tight, and something inside you says this might not be such a good idea, you’re more then likely to do it, because something else inside you says “don’t worry about it, it’s cool”. And so it goes, until Friday becomes Thursday, and some of your friends get a little scared because it’s all you talk about, and you can’t figure out what they’re so afraid of. Welcome to social opiate use, the fantasy of something that doesn’t, and never has existed. Except in your mind, that is.