A good point, but side note:
16% is still abysmal.
I think that we should be able to do a lot better than that.
The medical system is clearly failing people if the gold standard of getting people off of methamphetamine is 16%.
My suggestion: Trauma therapy and some hobbies that people can slowly replace their drug use with.
People mostly have those things like some hobby already and not everyone is all trauma trauma. Those are good points but the angle is getting too widespread. It's not for everyone. 16%, when you think in terms of the perfect sobriety people mostly expect you to get when they intervene you to a recovery whatever is actually pretty good. from 4 to 16, obviously the people who werent hitting the mark but did manage to use less is also something like (no idea what the real num,bers are) 25 to 75.
What I think people need to do, which is way fucking easier than focusing on past issues, replacements, sober dates, making dates, abstinence or severe goal setting, etc
Stop thinking about it this way and just do what you need to do. The less you're thinking about the drug use itself whether you're using or not and just focusing on the rest of your life on YOUR terms and deal with the trauma or other medical to psychosocial issues at a MUCH better advertised and available set of avenues.. MUCH better.
We have actually no system to accomodate any of the bright harm reduction talk to trauma and all that. The thing about trauma is it's always real and it's always realer when you think about it. Some people can actually get totally fucked up to extents they couldnt have prior imagined (they wanted no degradation at all) when they do to some trauma informed thing and you start reteaching yourself to think the you vs them stuff and those self-empowering phrases are only good for you if they don't sound completely fucking lame to somewhere between irrelevant and absolute insult when you're dealing with long-term neurological wiring issues to issue negative self-talk because you got your fucking ass raped 15 times when you were 10 or something. You get it?
Whatever the trauma is. There should at least be less trauma in getting into either recovery (of any sort) OR seperately the recovery system. It's actually good social work and widely viewable programming that would be the most effective in shifting things like public opinion saying "addict" as an identity when "having an addiction" is 1) a medical problem that even most heavy partiers don't ultimately get 2) not the same as dependence 3) not another identity also like thief, liar, jail, dead, whatever
Or the traumatized person who needs to learn to coddle himself in his own language through that particular programming to cope. There is a high level advocate or a few in this country who are just like this, and my trauma levels (if it was a competition) are DEFINITELY equivalent with as bad as it gets, and they go around successfully winning over politicians and medical advisory stuff with the everyone is traumatized argument.
Between that and other fields of trauma related incident there is a very introductory and nearly totally unavailable set of trauma informed care which often co-exists with the same person primarly working some other gig like psych ward nurse. So the hands on trauma informed (it takes a lot of attention and care to review yourself or another person this way) is NEVER accomplished. There is way too much other policy and whiteboarding going on, and half the time the fucking fax about your care or meds doesnt get through in ANY reasonable time or at ALL. Canadian system in Ontario.
A good talk on self esteem and devaluating all the words people use around this shit to just think for yourself and stop worrying about trauma this or addict that or ANY other thing that what your doing just getting high or well and having as decent a day as possible otherwise.
Absolutely immersing yourself in your darkest shit and head on with these drugs is fine too. Look at what the psychedelics crowd is always trying to do (well the shulgin-esque or spiritual healer to 'expand my mind maaaaan' types anyway)
I have zero shame for having any addictions or dependence. I can still; have some shit times and think in the same terms otherwise but I've manag
ed to remove the shameful part and I dont call myself an addict ever except if I slip it up a bit because I literally spent 30 years thinking of it the OTHER way around.
It takes a LONG time to trauma inform if its even wanted or NEEDED and its best to vice versa disseminate this to the PUBLIC so they STOP all the fucking presumptions, addict identity shit, and that perfect recovery because obviously EVERYTHING is the drugs fault or yours or whatever.
One good TV show about this would fucking do it. How about that? Not just the trauma trauma crowd too they're already well in and practically winning the decriminalization war.
