It’s an Inside Job –
Mar. 28, 2019 – I came to Thailand eight months ago with a heroin habit I couldn’t handle. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. In four years I had, mostly willingly, checked into 18 different rehabs, clinics and detoxes. I had attended hundreds of 12-Step meetings, I could quote passages of the Big Book and explain the science: the way drugs affect dopamine, the midbrain, and hippocampus. I could argue the the disease model of addiction—that, as the American National Institute on Drug Abuse says: “Addiction is a chronic, relapsing disorder characterised by compulsive drug seeking and use despite adverse consequences”. I could do these things, but after detoxing, once heroin had left my body and I was no longer physically dependent, I would still start using again.
