Beating Prescription Painkiller Addiction
Alysia’s Story
Alysia is a tiny woman with a broad Texas accent. Her language is peppered with words like “Hon” and “Bless his heart”—sweet language that belies the decades she spent abusing prescription drugs.
The problem she had with prescription painkillers started when she was fourteen years old. She had an accident on an all-terrain vehicle. In those days, they made them with three wheels but too many people had accidents alike Alysia’s. She landed on her neck, jamming her spine up into her skull. The doctors had her taking hydrocodone, Demerol and time-release morphine after her injury. That was the beginning of a habit that would last until she was thirty-nine years old and her family found Narconon South Texas to help her.
But in the intervening years, she consumed many tens of thousands of pain pills that she obtained through illicit means. She was taking thirty Lorcets a day—that’s a pill that contains ten milligrams of hydrocodone and 650 milligrams of acetaminophen. She would get as many of the pills as possible from unscrupulous pain management clinics. She just told the doctors what she wanted and they would provide it. She would walk out with 120 pain pills, 60 Xanax and 60 Soma, a muscle relaxant. She sold the Xanax and Soma to help pay for the opiates. She and several other people would drive up to Houston where there were plenty of these clinics.
The pills she got from these doctors would not be enough to keep her from getting sick from withdrawal symptoms when her pills would run out, so she would have to buy some from drug dealers too.
Oddly, the pills had a reverse effect on her—instead of making her dopey and sluggish, they speeded her up. She would stay up for days while she was on the pills and then finally collapse or pass out, even passing out in her driveway.
She would try to quit using the drugs—several times, in fact. But she could not get through the pain and sickness that showed up when she stopped taking them. She would only last for a day and a half before she would call someone and have them bring her pills.
But that wasn’t the only reason she could not quit. “When you start withdrawing, you get hit with all the bad things you have done,” she said. “I was a terrible example for my kids.” The guilt and depression that kicks in when addicts stop abusing drugs or alcohol is a major trap that keeps people locked in their addictions.
Up to a certain point, she managed to function in life and around her family, but as happens with most addicts, she began to deteriorate and her family intervened. She was running around with drug dealers and started missing family functions. Her sister was afraid she would get shot before she ever had a chance to overdose.
Her family found Narconon South Texas on the internet and decided that this was the right place for her. Her sister knew Alysia had already taken so many drugs, she wanted a place where there would be no more drugs used in treatment. The Narconon drug rehabilitation program uses only nutritional supplements in the course of the rehabilitation. Nutritional supplements are used to help ease addicts through the withdrawal phase and then are used again in the deep detoxification phase. This phase is called the Narconon New Life Detoxification.
Early in the recovery process, the Narconon New Life Detoxification helps addicts recover from the effects of addiction by activating the body’s ability to flush out old, stored drug toxins. Nutritional supplements, moderate daily exercise and time in a sauna combine to bring about a new brightness of outlook and a reduction in cravings. When physical cravings are reduced early in the recovery program, the person in recovery can then focus on learning the life skills they are going to need to stay sober after rehab is complete.
Once Alysia was through the detoxification phase, she was able to focus on resolving and repairing the life situations that had started her in the direction of relying on prescription opiates. She was finally able to face the destructive marriage she had lived with for seventeen years. She sent her ex-husband a letter wishing him success and happiness and, in the nicest response she had heard from him in years, he replied that he was glad she was going well. “It was a big weight off my chest,” she observed. “It changed my life.”
“My success in this program helped me become a better Christian, too,” Alysia added. “Before, I was popping pills in church and not being a good Christian. I was harming other people, selling drugs and that was just against the rules. I blamed God for the way my life was but I learned on this program that the reason my life was that way was because of me.
“People will ask me where I’m from and I tell them East Texas—then when they ask me what brought me down to South Texas, I tell them, “Well, honey, it’s a little thing called rehab. I tell them how the Narconon program saved my life. It teaches the skills that enable people to live drug-free lives, productive lives.”
