Must admit the specifics of doing drugs is not that interesting to me, it's more interesting to ask the question:
How does someone stop doing drugs?
How does someone stop doing drugs?
As for a general answer to your question, there isn’t one that I’m aware of. Everyone I know that’s gotten clean has wildly different stories.
Aside from that, there was no shaming and very little drama. Essentially, my previous situation was that I was surrounded by extremely abusive family and dangerously messed up friends. I more or less made friends with “normal” people, got away from a really bad situation and it all just sort of… worked out.
There’s absolutely no secret sauce or trick in my getting clean. I can’t count the number of my old friends that tried stuff like I did and it didn’t work out.
It was literally just luck.
About a year after I quit, I made a new friend. He was a nice guy, seemed normal, but one day he casually mentioned that he occasionally used stimulants including amphetamines. I cut off all contact with him immediately (as did all of my close friends. It’s a good example of support in this case.)
I guess I was able to recognize and decisively take action to avoid temptation about a year in. This was likely also luck. I was in a pretty good place with my life in general, had that occurred six months earlier or six months later it could have had a different outcome.
So the answer is either a day or a year or never. It’s been ten years and I’ve only known where to get meth for about one day of it. I still get cravings to this day, I’m just no longer in the habit of indulging them.
I say this as someone who abused drugs when I was younger and came from an extremely abusive family environment.
And thanks for sharing and giving some great answers.
Addicts can't just stop and never do drugs again like a normal person. If it's there, they'll take it. It's not about strength and being able to walk away. It never goes away for an addict and the best they can do is avoid situations where drugs will be presented. Isolation from users is the best course of action.
Also, many people abuse drugs and even become addicted, but are not addicts. An addict is wired differently.
A safe, clean, and comfortable living environment.
Enough food.
The confidence in oneself, or their support network, to truly believe without fear, that they won’t end up back out on the streets.
A well paying job that isn’t dehumanizing, traumatizing, exploitative, or abusive.
The first requires a presence of mind to enter the void left behind by the thing, that people doing drugs probably lack, since they are, in essence, stimulation addicts. Drugs fill a void they avoid facing. Stopping doing drugs would cause them to face that void.
The second is more amenable, because you can taper off with replacement therapy. Switch to using less bad drugs, or indeed anything stimulating. Continuously replace the thing you're getting stimulation from with another, slightly less stimulating thing, until the thing that is left is sufficiently nonstimulating that stopping and accepting the void feels manageable.
I went from putting speed in my morning coffee to eating a pound of chocolate a day.
In fact, all amphetamines contain a PEA base - they are substitutes phenylethylamines, for example Alpha-MethylPHenEThylAMINE.
For example, off the top of my head, mescaline is also in the phenylethylamine family but is a wildly different drug with different receptor bonding affinity and subjective effects. I doubt anyone would want to mix up the two.
I had friends, housing, food, a stable day to day routine and _nobody_ looked down on me for my problems. I was able to talk openly about what I was going through and the circumstances that led to my addiction in the first place.
Normally (at least as Americans) we think of addicts as getting all of those things in rehab facilities and getting “fixed” by that few weeks or months. I’ve been in rehabs and mental hospitals and genuinely gotten some necessary help from them, but in my case I only started getting really better after I found myself in a situation where I had all of that support without feeling like it had an expiration date.
It feels like drugs made him dumb and also he is living in some kind of parallel reality. It's becoming harder and harder to connect.
Also, in his reality it's perfectly ok to consume drugs, he's also constantly offering to share the experience with all people he meets.
It's sad situation and looks desperate because he's aggressively against any help, he consider himself better than others because of the drugs (he is sure they allow him to "see" more than we see), and he doesn't listen to anyone.
Also, he's unable to function in the society. He's becoming obnoxious, so all his friends and even relatives are starting to avoid him.
He doesn't look healthy, he doesn't look happy, and I know he is unable to achieve any of his goals (the goals I've heard from him that he wants to achieve).
You stop doing drugs the same way you stop eating badly, by trying to find substitutes, and by putting distance between you and it (i.e. if I don't want to eat snacks, I avoid buying it at the store, so it's more work for me to eat poorly)