A year and a half ago I had to call emergency services to revive my friend. She'd gotten herself a court order for mental health treatment, and the mental healt

A year and a half ago I had to call emergency services to revive my friend. She'd gotten herself a court order for mental health treatment, and the mental health professionals thought she'd benefit from getting addicted to benzodiazepine anxiety drugs too. She'd only wanted the benzo "as needed", but they made her take the full dose every day. After 6 weeks the helpful effect of the benzo wore off, leaving her with just another addiction. She ordered heroin from her street pharmacist to get her through the benzo withdrawal. I later learned from a HN comment that benzos increase the potency of opiates, so they don't actually go well together... The firefighters did more for my friend with their Naloxone than any of the mental health professionals. Her drinking was under control for about two weeks. Then the naloxone wore off... I think the fundamental problem with current approaches to addiction/rehabilitation is that they mostly view addicts as having had a 'moral failure' in choosing to use 'recreational drugs'. ~80% of rehab facilities use some version of the 12-step program, which is helpful for ~10-15% of people who are addicted to something. I've observed some cases of alcoholism too. It's not very different from street drugs, except every corner store has their vice. About five years ago someone figured out that the brains of alcoholics switch to running on acetate, one of the breakdown products of ethanol. Alcoholism is basically a metabolic problem, as far as I can tell. I found an article by an alternative medicine heretic ~3 years ago that said nerve tissue can run on coconut oil too. I've heard a tablespoon really does help with alcohol cravings. IMHO, it's much more productive to view addiction as self-medicating physical and mental anguish. People who are emotionally stable tend to not get hooked. I was just transcribing the videos my friend made of us frying donuts (in coconut oil), taken two weeks before her first hospitalization. She was doing very well, then she ran out of alcohol & the professionals got hold of her... A very smart woman I know once said, "When a person feels safe, the false ego goes away." Helping people to feel safe is the most important part of all effective drug rehabilitations. Sometimes people need access to their drug of choice to feel safe. It's much better to give them pharmaceutical-grade drugs [1], and wait for them to age out of their addiction, than to train them to be helpless in jail, or help them to feel like failures in a 12-step-based "drug rehab". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782416 - Switzerland gives their most hopeless heroin addicts access to pharmaceutical-grade heroin.