Kicking Heroin Addiction
By looking at Claire, you would never think that she was a heroin addict. But that worked to her advantage. She could rob her bosses or steal from her family and no one suspected her for a very long time.
She got a much later start in abusing drugs than many other people who wind up in rehab. She had smoked a little marijuana when she was in school but it was the breakup of her marriage when she was in her twenties that got her using drugs more aggressively. With a two-year-old baby, she was not prepared to go out on her own when her husband left the family. A doctor prescribed Xanax, Prozac, and Lortab for her at this time. She didn’t like the Xanax because it put her to sleep but she liked the high she got from Prozac and Lortab. She found that she didn’t cry about her broken marriage anymore.
To get enough of the drugs to keep her thoroughly medicated, she needed to go from doctor to doctor, asking for prescriptions. This action is called doctor-shopping. She also learned how to phone in prescriptions after working at a personal injury law firm and from listening to nurses phone in her own prescriptions. So from doctor-shopping, she progressed on to calling in her own prescriptions—meaning she was committing prescription fraud. By this point she was severely addicted to these drugs and whatever it took to get the medications she needed, she was game.
For a while, she was able to maintain this life. But before too long, the fabric of her life began to fray. She lost custody of her son. She got caught in her prescription fraud and spent 16 months in prison. She attended a Twelve Step-based program in prison but all she learned was how to give in and give up. “This time in prison mainly showed me how to be a sneakier criminal and a really bad addict,” Claire commented.
When she got out of prison, she tried to stay clean by living in halfway houses and going to more Twelve Step meetings but these didn’t help her. “They told me to coexist with my addiction and hold it at bay,” Claire remembered. “I couldn’t do that. If there were drugs around, I was all in.”
Then she married a man who was a heroin addict and for awhile, the two of them tried to help each other stay sober. But gradually, they slipped into alcohol abuse, then prescription opiate abuse and then to heroin. She was injecting heroin now, and her life really took a turn for the worse.
Claire began to get arrested time after time for DUI, for violating her probation and for stealing money from her job. Ironically, the place she was working was a drug and alcohol abuse program. People would come in and get drug tested and Claire would run the meetings, but never stopped using opiates. “I never could raise my responsibility enough to see that it was wrong,” she explained. “All I knew was if I stopped using, I was going to get violently ill and then everyone would know I was an addict. I had to keep that part of me hidden.”
She developed severe infections in her hands as a result of the heroin injections into the backs of her hands. She finally had to admit to her family that she was injecting heroin and needed help. Another year-long stay in a halfway house did not stop the self-destructive path she was on. Someone offered her methadone and she was right back into using opiates again.
Everyone in Claire’s family stopped talking to her, even her son who was 19 years old by now. In 2008, her last year as an addict, she spent 100 days in jail for theft. She was stealing, pawning, shoplifting, whatever she had to do to stay alive.
At this low point in Claire’s life, her father discovered the Narconon drug rehab program in Louisiana. He learned that it was an alternative to the Twelve Step programs that had not helped Claire recover. He begged her to try this program and the next day, she was at the front door of Narconon Louisiana.
It took time for her to realize that this rehab program was going to bring her out of all the destruction and chaos. The first sign that this one was different came in during her time in the Withdrawal Unit. “I used to think that if you are smiling or laughing, you must be on something because life is too overwhelming. But while I was still in the Withdrawal Unit, I began to laugh with the other students. So I just hung on for the next part of the program,” Claire said.
During the sauna phase of the rehab program—the Narconon New Life Detoxification—Claire was able to flush out the toxic residues of her earlier drug use. “As I went through this step, I began to have more energy, I slept better without needing anything to help me sleep. I used to wake up like I had been punched in the stomach but I didn’t have that anxiety anymore.” And best of all, Claire’s strong physical cravings for drugs went away as the toxic residues were washed away.
In the remainder of the Narconon drug recovery program, Claire learned just how to rebuild her relationships with her family. She also learned for herself the reasons that she had started using drugs and found that she didn’t need to victimize herself that way any longer.
Now Claire has been sober for several years. Each January, her father sends her roses on the anniversary of her arrival at Narconon Riverbend. She talks to her son every week and her father twice a week.
“Now I wake up happy and I didn’t do that for twenty long years,” Claire exclaimed. “I could not have achieved that without the Narconon program.”