Opiate and Benzodiazepine Addict Finds Sobriety

You might think that with an alcoholic father and brother, Jeff would have avoided using drugs. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. From drinking, Jeff progressed to a steady addiction to heroin and benzodiazepines. He overdosed twice but survived. His brother didn’t survive but died of a heroin overdose.

Jeff’s problems started when his dad left the family and his mother had to move them to a poor section of town and work long hours to support her children. Jeff didn’t have much supervision and took advantage of this situation to hang with the older kids on the corner that he thought were cool. When they drank beer, he drank beer with them. He was just twelve years old.

The next year saw him using marijuana. And by the time he was twenty, he was an opiate and benzodiazepine addict. He would stay that way for fifteen years before he could find lasting sobriety.

He tried to clean himself up by getting on methadone programs but that just chained him to the drug program and the drug itself. He briefly got off the opiates by going to a rehab program in Florida where he went through withdrawal for the entire duration of the 28-day program. He didn’t sleep at all for the first twelve days of this withdrawal. The third week he was there, he told them, “You are sending me out to start dying again, I’m not ready to go.” But at the end of the 28 days, they sent him out, still dopesick. From there, he went to a halfway house but he was still in withdrawal from methadone nine days later.

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He called a friend from home and told him to buy him a ticket to come home and bring a bottle of methadone to the airport. He needed some rest and some relief from the bone-deep aches and lack of energy he still felt.

His mother convinced him to go to Twelve Step meetings to find some help. He went, but he would sit in the parking lot and drink before the meetings, even though he wasn’t much of a drinker. The other people in the meeting didn’t understand why he would go at all, but he really wanted something to happen to change him so he could get sober. It just never happened for him.

Before he finally found Narconon, he described his existence this way: “I was getting really bad at the end there. I was staying with my mother or my sister, I wasn’t doing anything but getting high all the time.” His mother and sister began to look for different ways to get him help. Since Twelve Step had not worked for him, they looked online for a different kind of program. They found the Narconon rehab program in Louisiana.

At first, Jeff didn’t know what to think of these people who wanted to help him, because where he came from, that just didn’t happen. Still, slowly and step by step, Jeff began to see the Narconon program work on him and his addiction.

It was in the withdrawal phase that he first noticed the difference between this program and others he had been to. By the eleventh day, he found himself sleeping as much as six hours a night—something that was unheard of for him when he was in withdrawal. He said, “In my past experience, an opiate-benzo kick had been almost unbearable, but this time, it was tolerable—it was better than tolerable. I kept expecting that the next day would be the one where I would get the real peak of sickness but it never came.” The unique techniques used in the Narconon Withdrawal Unit provided a quite different experience for Jeff this time—one that would give a very positive beginning to his new sobriety.

As he went through the sauna detoxification phase of the Narconon program, for the first time since he had been a kid, he found himself able to have honest fun in life. His energy began to return and he began to laugh with the other students on the program.

But while he was starting to feel much better, he still needed to straighten out his thinking. He had not yet learned to embody honesty, helping others, and caring for himself in his life. As he continued through the steps of the program, as he said, “The nonsense began to go away along with the ridiculous ideas of what I was going to do with my life. I had this fresh palette and lost my skewed, wrong ideas of where I was going in my life. This program taught me to see things the way they are right now.”

He learned consequences and learned right from wrong. Since he started using drugs so early in life, he had never had the chance to learn these lessons. His life started changing and he began to be able to make ethical decisions. “You have to learn to see your real intentions,” he stated. “You can’t lie to yourself or it all goes bad. Once you learn this and get practiced doing it for a while, it becomes natural.”

In the last few steps of the Narconon program, he discovered for himself what responsibility really was and discovered too, the methods he could use to resolve problems in life. When he could fix any problems that came up, he would not need to find escape in the use of opiates or benzodiazepines.

“I sleep well these days because there is nothing I have created that is coming back to me,” Jeff summarized. “At the end of my day, I now feel satisfied because I have gotten things done. I get to help a lot of people each day and I have a great time doing it.”

(To preserve privacy, the photo does not show an actual Narconon student or graduate.)