This is another section of my unpublished book, Clean Enough.  I describe stages in the process of addiction that I’ve noticed in opioid addicts presenting for treatment.  I must point out that these stages have not been validated by clinical research, but rather are drawn from simple observation.  Read on:

I am always impressed by how similar addiction progresses in one individual versus the next.  The next reader’s comments and my comments afterward demonstrate a pattern that I have observed in one opioid addict after another.  Throughout these posts, comments that I receive from others will be italicized.

Over the past several years I’ve written a book about my experiences with addiction, and about my take on traditional treatment methods, buprenorphine, and on the psychodynamic factors at play in those with addictions.

I went through the standard process of sending requests to agents and publishers to take a look at a few of the 300-some pages, and received the standard series of rejections.  I then discovered several companies that were very excited about what I had written, and found that by some odd coincidence all required a down payment on my part.  So the book sits on my computer—or at least sat on my computer until now.