Alternatives to Methadone / Suboxone

In the book “How to Quit without Feeling Sh*t”(Published by Piatkus Books : London: 2008) Drs. Patrick Holford, David Miller and James Braly explore the use of nutrient supplements, especially Amino Acids but also vitamins, minerals and essential fats… in the treatment of addiction. Their  rationale is that drugs disrupt the production of essential brain chemicals including serotonin and dopamines. They literally mimic and effectively replace these chemical in the brain, with the result that the body stops producing them. This accounts for the withdrawals felt by addicts when they quit using . They are suffering from a lack of the natural chemicals their body would normally produce.  Treatments such as methadone and suboxone, benzodiazepines etc only compound this problem as they only replace one  addictive substance with another , further interfering with the natural  chemistry of the brain..   Amino acid supplements on the other hand naturally help the body to replace these chemicals thus relieving withdrawal effects without the major side effects of pharmaceuticals. 

 The doctors have compiled a treatment plan for each addictive substance drawing from an array of amino acids, vitamins and minerals . There are also exercise schedules and eating plans.   I myself have effectively used Tryptophan, Taurine and Glutamine, some of the supplements recommended by Drs Holford et al for the overcoming of heroin addiction…. I could not afford to follow the full regime as the supplements are rather pricey. I found them to be remarkably effective at reducing the unpleasant effects of Heroin withdrawal, particularly the tryptophan (a precursor of serotonin) . Taken on its own it would ease the cramps ,cold turkey  ( hold and cold flushes—turkey skin ) and kicking ( body spasms) effects to the point where they were tolerable. In conjunction with Glutamine and Taurine it would allow me to sleep for up to four hours at a time  even on the first three nights of withdrawal when sleep is unheard of.  Granted I was taking it in dosages as high as three times (only with the Tryptophan)   the recommended dosage ( Holford et al do allow for this and claim it is relatively harmless as long as not continued for more than a few days.)  Also although they helped me get clean they didn’t  help me stay clean…. I continued to relapse even after using this method to get clean…. For that I had to find my way into the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous.  But they did start the process.

I have scoured the net looking for information on this topic and there is nothing on medical or academic  sites, no research being done. Where it is being mentioned is on Q+A and chat sites where addicts are sharing experiences. It seems that because the substances are supplements and thus not open to patenting and resulting big bucks, the pharmaceutical and medical industries are ignoring , if not actively discouraging any information on this topic.

Furthermore Tryptophan is not available as a supplement in the US… the only country in the world where this is the case… It was banned in the 90’s after a contaminated shipment cased people to get ill.. Coincidently (or not) the ban was announced days before the announcement of the introduction of SSRIs (prozac etc) onto the market. It has subsequently been reintroduced as a highly priced patented medication.

There is evidence that these substances work… Granted there may be some problems with them… apparently people react very differently to these substances and what may work for one person may not work for another.  But this is just as true of pharmaceuticals.  There may be side effects and dangers with taking higher dosages.  But research needs to be done… Questions need to be asked.

I would appeal to people who have personal experience and knowledge of the substances to start disseminating his information…with addicts with medical professional, researchers  .. We need to start appealing to doctors and medical researchers to look into the use of these substances.  I am not a medical person but plan to continue doing research in this area and  ask people interested in or with information in this subject to please contact me here.

RECOVERY IS CONTAGIOUS

Addiction is a chronic ailment.  As with any other chronic ailments, recovery from addiction is a life-long process and requires ongoing vigilance and commitment to following a treatment regime. Chronic ailments are not cured, but can go into remission and the sufferer may gain a temporary reprieve from  its effects. Yet the myth persists that addicts can and should be cured by a single episode of treatment in a rehabilitation centre. This simply does not happen. The vast  majority of addicts who have spent 28 days in a treatment centre come out and relapse within the first week. Most addicts will relapse and need several visits to rehabs before they finally get clean.

White ( William L. White. (2007). The New Recovery Advocacy Movement in America. Addiction,102, 696–703.) claims that the  prevailing acute care paradigm is flawed and sets people up for failure “We are currently placing people with severe, complex, and prolonged addiction careers within treatment designs whose brevity and low intensity produces little likelihood of a positive recovery outcome. When resumption of addiction then occurs, as it does so often, the individual is blamed and punished (via divorce, loss of child custody, revocation of probation, job dismissal, expulsion from school, etc.) on the grounds that “they had their chance and blew it.”  This he claims is “analogous to treating a bacterial infection with half of the needed antibiotics and then blaming the patient when the infection returns in a more intractable form.”

 There is, however,  growing evidence that the longer people spend in treatment, the longer they participate in the NA and AA fellowships, the greater chance they have of recovery.

In this country the majority of addicts will never be able to afford rehab and the state does not have the resources to bring even a fraction into state subsidised rehabilitation. Even for the better off citizens who can afford rehab.... the multiple stays that are often required before true recovery starts can be a huge and debilitating drain. Many a family has gone bankrupt trying to get a loved one clean. A new model of sustained recovery management is needed  with increased interest in post treatment support mechanisms and for developing and mobilising recovery support resources within communities

In the late 1990s, new grassroots recovery community organizations (RCOs) began springing up across America. The last two decades has seen the proliferation of new recovery institutions across the country including recovery  homes, centres, schools, ministries and even industries. According to White et al William (L. White , John F. Kelly & Jeffrey D. Roth (2012). New Addiction-Recovery Support Institutions: Mobilizing Support Beyond Professional Addiction Treatment and Recovery Mutual Aid. Journal of Groups in Addiction & Recovery, 7:2-4, 297-317.) these new recovery support institutions share several distinctive features. First, they fit neither the designation of addiction treatment nor of recovery mutual-aid fellowship. Second, they provide recovery support needs not directly addressed through either of the above. Third, their target of support extends beyond the individual. Where addiction treatment and mutual aid both provide personal guidance during the recovery process, these new recovery support institutions seek to create a physical and social environment  in which personal, family and community recovery can flourish. Fourth, these new institutions reflect, and are in turn being shaped by, a larger culture of recovery.

A broad cultural and political mobilization of people in recovery is emerging bringing with it a greater awareness of the challenges of addiction and recovery. There is a greater sense of identity and belonging to a recovery community enabling  previously marginalized individual

to undergo processes of consciousness raising, mobilization, and culture making. This culture is providing a diversity of new tools-- words, ideas, metaphors, rituals, support institutions, support roles, and recovery support services-- to ease the process of recovery initiation, recovery maintenance, and enhanced quality of life in long-term recovery. What recovering people historically experienced inside treatment or a recovery fellowship—connection, mutual identification, and community—is now being extended beyond the walls of these institutions and meeting rooms. Addiction and recovery is being explored and exposed  in the arts, film, music as never before. Celebrities are making their status as recovering addicts known and sharing their experience with their fans, among them Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Robert Downey Junior, Eric Clapton, Angelina Jolie and Samuel Jackson. As it becomes exposed in the public domain adiction is losing its taboo status, addicts become less stigmatised and it becomes easier for them and their families to reach out for help.  

One of the central concepts in recovery discourse is that of recovery capital. This term refers to  the collective internal and external resources that can be mobilized to initiate and sustain the resolution of alcohol and drug related problems. In addition to financial, material, and instrumental resources,  recovery capital includes such things as a sense of belonging within a community of peers and supportive relationships with caring others.

Often when an addict comes into recovery (or wishes to do so)  they have no resources left. Material possessions  have all  been sold, and  friends and family alienated.  In such a situation an addict may become desperate enough to be willing to go to any lengths to make a change in their life. Or they may simply become hopeless and give up.  If no resources are available the second scenario is most likely. Some resources are necessary for an addict to recover , even it is just a sense of hope or someone who cares enough to help. Initially all resources  need to come from an outside source. Care however needs to be taken with the resources that are made available to an addict. Simply given an addict money or shelter may  protect them from the natural consequences of their actions and enable them to keep using. It is impossible for  addicts to build up resources as long as they continue to use.

Access to treatment will allow an addict to build up psychological, mental and spiritual resources   -- but where does that leave someone coming out of treatment with no material or community resources available to him? And how does an addict with no financial resources get into treatment in the first place?....Many treatment centres do offer reduced rates or even free treatment for a small number of patients, but this is a drop in the ocean. According to Davidson and White et al   ( Larry Davidson PhD , William L. White MA , Dave Sells PhD , Timothy Schmutte PhD , Maria O'Connell PhD, Chyrell Bellamy PhD & Michael Rowe PhD. (2010) Enabling or Engaging? The Role of Recovery Support Services in Addiction Recovery. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 28:4, 391-416,)  in the US   only 10% of people in need of treatment for substance abuse receive such treatment annually and only 25% will receive such treatment at any stage during their lives. Given the lower rates of access to health care in South Africa the figures here are most likely significantly lower.

The Recovery movement has developed in the American milieu but many of its ideas and tenets may be useful in South Africa, (particularly the community aspects) where the vast majority are unable to afford private treatment and public facilities lack the resources to deal with the problem. What needs to be explored locally is not only the need for post-treatment recovery support but innovative ways of bringing treatment and recovery to communities and people that cannot afford to pay for extended stays in institutions...

Also important in the South African context is the idea of Community Recovery - not only in the sense of recovery in the community but of the recovery of communities. Communities that have been subject to historical traumas are more susceptible to addiction and drug and alcohol related problems. These communities are in need of healing. They suffer from a range of social ills of which drugs and alcohol are but a part. They do however play an significant  role in exacerbating those problems depriving the communities of  resources and draining hope. On a positive note recovery is contagious. Recovery is spread through exposure to recovery carriers (“wounded healers”)—people in recovery make it infectious  through carrying the message of their personal story of hope and redemption and their love and service to those still suffering. By building up recovery capital in these areas we may be able to make a beginning at untangling the web of interrelated social ills.  Individuals coming into recovery begin to be positive role models for the youth replacing the gangsters and drug dealers as people to be admired and emulated  -- representing the only path to wealth and upward mobility. Parents  begin to spend more time with their family and being a positive influence in their children’s lives. Children spend more time at school and engaged in creative, sporting and learning activities.  Less violence, less crime, less unwanted pregnancy---these could be the result of a fairly small number of people coming into recovery and beginning of a significant shift to community healing.

Community Recovery

Since coming into the NA Fellowship I have realized that the one thing addicts have in common  is a sense of alienation, of not being fully part of one’s family, one’s community,  and disconnected from one’s peers. Often they have suffered a trauma which is at the root of these feelings. It seems to me that this experience may be paralleled  at a community level and the communities most at risk of drug and alcohol related problems  are those most alienated from  economic and cultural processes.  William White et al ( Arthur C. Evans, Roland Lamb & William L. White (2013) The Community as Patient: Recovery Based Community Mobilization in Philadelphia PA (USA), 2005-2012) have claimed that communities that have been victims of  what they call “historical trauma” become particularly vulnerable to a wide spectrum of personal and social problems. They describe historical trauma as a “physical or cultural assault on a people via attempted genocide or sustained colonization.”  Such trauma erodes indigenous sources of cultural and personal resilience leaving communities, community institutions, neighbourhoods, families, and individuals  particularly vulnerable to drug and alcohol related  problems.  Over time, learned helplessness and hopelessness in the face of such problems can become part of the community culture.

The authors continue by  exploring the multiple functions drugs and alcohol play in these communities:    “They serve as a relief from emotional distress, an escape from feelings  of powerlessness, and a trigger  for the discharge of anger.'
Furthermore: “They become symbols of cultural protest and the focus-point of subcultures, some-times creative, but mostly criminal, within which those most disconnected from mainstream community life find mutual support. They spawn underground economies and careers. They serve as instruments of financial exploitation by predatory industries, and they serve as tools of personal and cultural pacification.”

The result of this is a weakening of  family, kinship , neighbourhood, and natural community ties as well as  social institutions (churches, schools, workplaces, civic organizations) which traditionally meet social support needs. This create an environment in which personal and social problems flourish and  personal and collective capacities to respond to rising problems are diminished. Traditional support structures are replaced by alternative social structures, from gangs to mutual aid groups to cell phone and internet-based social networking. Furthermore there is an ever growing need for increasingly industrialized and commercialized health and social services agencies and agents of social control ( police, courts, correctional, and child protection agencies). Reliance on these agencies creates a vicious cycle which further  hastens the dissolution of family, kinship, neighbourhood, and community ties.

From the above we see how personal issues and community issues become interrelated and intertwined when dealing with addiction. At present we have two distinct and separate approaches to the drug problem. On the one hand we have rehabilitation centres, hospitals and institutions , as well as mutual aid organisations like Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, treating the problem at the level of the individual. On the other hand we have government departments, NGO’s and other agencies looking at the problem at the communal level.White et al argue "that the healing process can and should move beyond individuals and families to encompass whole communities" and the creation of  naturally occurring healing environments that "simultaneously elevate personal family and community health." I would argue that we need to start looking at the problem in a more holistic way. Just as community problems feed individual alienation, and vice versa, individual recovery can be the beginning of community recovery, and vice versa.


Anne Wilson Schaeff argues that our society is driven by addictive behaviour. The obsession with extracting fossils fuels with no regard to the environmental damage  and our fixation with material wealth and possessions as a measure of success certainly mirror the behaviour of an addict. Here again the lessons of addiction and recovery at an individual level could perhaps hold some  solution to our societal addictions. (Are we as a society able to learn the lessons of addiction, or will we like an addict in denial have to reach a rock bottom, a point of no return before we are able to make changes?) It seems possible then that exploring and attempting to understand  individual experiences of addiction and recovery  can give us insight to the processes at community and social level.