Cocaine addiction is a much grander aspect of addiction than rolling joint and smoking marijuana. This is not to say one has harsher affects than the other, because each have their own inherent life-destroying aspects involved. For the price of a small sack of cocaine, you can buy a whole bag of marijuana. Therefore, cocaine is a much more expensive addiction. We are not here to learn about pricing, however, because lives are lost every day to this disease, and they can be saved. Cocaine is most commonly inhaled through the nose, causing a much stronger high than drugs like marijuana, more comparable to crack, the smokable form of cocaine.
Things you’ll need:
1. Drug treatment center
2. Professional help
3. 12-Step meetings
CA meetings and NA Meetings are the first stop for any drug addict. Cocaine Anonymous (CA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) are the means to building a new life. Remember all those friends who took your money? Or remember how your loved one stole money from you? Meetings are the answer. In a basic meeting, an addict sits down and listens to the struggles of others trying to stay clean. He learns the means to staying clean, to rebuilding a life and to finding spirituality. Meetings are not for everyone, but they should at least be attempted. If they keep you clean, all the better. They will rarely make you go out and inhale more cocaine.
I was watching a show on addiction a few months ago, where one cocaine addict who had the girlfriend, the high-paying job and a minor addiction found himself sleeping on the roof of one of his friend’s apartments. He had all that one would want, or at least the basics, only to lose them to his cocaine addiction. Cocaine destroys many lives. It can stop your heart. It can make you commit major crimes. It can empty your bank account.
One thing you might learn while battling any addiction is this: there are no easy ways out. Yes, I wanted an easy way out too. Much like a get-rich-quick scheme, there are plenty of ideas on how to stay off cocaine. Usually, like anything else, hard work pays off. You can watch your relationships improve, your bank accounts rise and maybe the drug dealers will stop harassing you. As a personal example, I found my cocaine addiction robbed me of most of what money I had. I became sub-human in a sense, living on the run, my heart beating fast and my mind losing control. I needed something else, something beyond meetings, jobs and self-help books to read.
Develop a religious side. This will sound like lecture, so I will try to ere on the side of beliefs. Many addicts out there lost their beliefs, or pray to something above that they can escape addiction. Some call it God, a higher power or force, Yahweh, anything really is fine. One aspect to my addiction was that, after using drugs for years, I had no real friends left. So I went to meetings, began to pray and began to work. Things turned out fine for me. I am not the kind of religious person, who goes to church every week, but I do have faith, and faith is what I always wanted.
Live a real life. Living out of cheap motels and cars is not a way to live. As a last resort, when cocaine addiction is destroying our lives, we can sit down, write a list and begin to act on what we want to do. Most of us want a real life, with real people knocking on our doors instead of drug dealers and other criminals. We can say all the things we want from our lives, all the hopes we have. Cocaine will be paramount as a problem here, a roadblock to what we want. Living a real life is perhaps a cliché, but clichés are better than any day of a cocaine hangover.