There is a persistent idea in some recovery spaces that if you take a medication for addiction, you're not really in recovery — you've just swapped one drug for another. It's an idea with enormous staying power and very little support in evidence.
For opioid use disorder, medications like buprenorphine and methadone are associated with large reductions in overdose deaths. Naltrexone is another option. For alcohol use disorder, naltrexone and acamprosate have solid evidence behind them, and they remain badly underprescribed. These medications don't make someone high when taken as prescribed. What they do is quiet the cravings and stabilize the brain enough for a person to rebuild everything else: work, relationships, health, sleep.
Nobody tells a person with diabetes they're cheating by taking insulin, or a person with depression that an antidepressant doesn't count. Recovery is about getting your life back. If a medication helps you do that, it's a tool, not a compromise. The decision about whether it's right for you belongs to you and your doctor — not to anyone's opinion of what recovery is supposed to look like.
✦ Quote
"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick."
— Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)
◎ Prompt
If you've ruled out medication, ask yourself honestly where that rule came from — evidence, a doctor, or something you heard in a room. Consider bringing the question to a physician who treats addiction, even if only to hear the options.
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