If you’re serious about beating your addiction, you need to know:
- Whether or not you need OxyContin addiction treatment
- If you do, what types of addiction treatments are available – and which is right for you.
Do You Need Addiction Treatment – Addicted or Just Dependent?
OxyContin is an opiate medication, and like with all opiates, if you use the medication regularly your body will become dependent on it. Importantly though, opiate dependence is not the same as opiate addiction; and if you are only opiate dependent and not addicted, you do not require addiction treatment.
You can be either:
- Opiate dependent but not opiate addicted
- Opiate dependent and opiate addicted
OxyContin Dependence
The regular use of opiates results in structural changes in the brain. These structural changes cause you to require increasing quantities of opiates to feel the same effects (tolerance) and these changes are the reason you feel withdrawal symptoms when you stop using or when you wait too long between doses.
As you use opiates over time, your brain attempts to restore equilibrium by reducing the number of opiate receptors available. With fewer opiate receptors available in the brain, you need to take a larger dose to get the same effects, and when you take no dose at all, your ‘normal’ levels of endogenous opiates are insufficient, and this causes you to experience withdrawal symptoms.
Anyone who uses or abuses opiates on a daily basis for more than a couple of weeks will develop some degree of physical dependence.
*However, if you are using opiates only as prescribed and never take more than you’re supposed to, then while you may become dependent, you are unlikely addicted and so do not require addiction treatment. People who do not become addicted to opiates can generally stop taking these medications by slowly tapering down their daily dose, as directed by a care physician.
OxyContin Addiction
According to the American Pain Society, addiction is characterized by behaviors that include:
- A loss of control over the use of a drug
- Compulsive drug use
- Continuing
to use or abuse a drug despite obvious harms from the use 1
Taking a medication as directed rarely results in compulsive use – but with medications like OxyContin that offer such feelings of well being, it’s easy to start taking a little more than prescribed – and once you start abusing OxyContin it’s a very slippery slope to the compulsive use and loss of control of addiction. If you take OxyContin for any reason other than prescribed, then you are an opiate abuser, and if you find that you have difficulty controlling how much or how often you use; then you are likely also an opiate addict.
(Not sure if you’re addicted, take an addiction self test to find out.)
If you are addicted to OxyContin, you will almost certainly require addiction treatment to break free from the drug.
- References
page last update Aug 04, 2011
