While heroin withdrawal will never be pleasant, and quitting opiates will always be difficult, qualified opioid addiction treatment facilities can offer medical detox - a process where targeted therapies are used to ease the process of detox and the transition into recovery.īecause medically supervised detox is more comfortable, it’s also safer for the person undergoing treatment. It is largely a symptom of quitting cold turkey, without any medication or support to help make the process more comfortable. Does Everyone Have to Experience Dope Sickness to Come Off Heroin?ĭope sickness is the reality for so many addicts who are struggling to get clean from opiates, but it doesn’t have to be that way. When the simple way to stop feeling dope sick is to use opiates, they’ll do it without much of a second thought. Even when someone has experienced it in the past, they can be taken off-guard by the severe effects of withdrawal. As soon as the drug’s effects kick in, the user almost immediately feels better. Add to this the fact that if a user doesn’t get their fix dope sickness can take hold in a matter of hours and it’s easy to comprehend why so many heroin addicts try many times before they are ever able to successfully make it past withdrawal.Īnother factor in this is that a single dose of heroin can eliminate dope sickness. This is the issue that makes dope sickness such an effective deterrent against recovery. If you know that you’re going to get violently ill when you take an action - or, in this case, the lack of an action - you’re going to do whatever is necessary to avoid experiencing those effects. Unfortunately, many people don’t make it past the first few days, deciding to relapse rather than continue to feel sick.Ĭontact Us Why Is Dope Sickness a Barrier to Recovery From Opiate Addiction? After that, symptoms start to tail off, but they usually last the next few days and sometimes as long as a few weeks after the peak. The first 3-4 days tend to be the most unpleasant, and many addicts report a peak in dope sickness around the third or fourth day. At best, this is an extremely unpleasant experience, and at worst, it can be dangerous - even fatal. There have been cases where excessive diarrhea and vomiting have caused severe dehydration, and sustained elevations in blood pressure and heart rate can lead to heart failure.įor many, it takes only a few hours of sobriety before dope sickness sets in. Taken by themselves, many of these symptoms are looked at as minor, but during sickness, a person undergoing withdrawal can experience some or all of these at once, at a high level of severity. In just a few hours, these symptoms can morph into full-blown heroin withdrawal. Most people who have experienced dope sickness say that it starts with a range of minor but extremely foreboding sensations: fatigue, runny nose and other cold-like symptoms, mild soreness, sensitive skin, tingling or restless legs. What Are the Signs and Symptoms of Dope Sickness? Dope sickness describes the harsh physical symptoms of withdrawal from opiates. The brain provides negative feedback to this absence, which, in the case of heroin, causes severe issues and discomfort throughout the body. Withdrawal symptoms occur when these substances are suddenly no longer accessible in the brain. Over time, the brain becomes dependent on the presence of these chemicals and the substances that help create them. When a person habitually abuses opiates, the active molecules in the drug bind to opioid receptors in the brain that prompt the release of dopamine, a natural chemical that controls feelings of happiness, pleasure and euphoria. Why Does Heroin Make You Dope Sick?īecause dope sickness is an accompanying factor to heroin withdrawal, it functions in the same way as many periods of withdrawal. Because of the many stories from addicts going through it, even those who have never experienced it understand what it means to be dope sick and take the necessary steps to avoid the feeling. It’s also said to be extremely unpleasant, with severe symptoms that last anywhere from several days to a few weeks.īecause of this, dope sickness has become a legendary concept for people abusing opiates and often a barrier to getting clean, because addicts remember how unpleasant it is to be dope sick. It signals the body’s reaction to not having access to the chemicals on which it has become dependent. Dope sickness is, essentially, another term for opiate withdrawal.
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