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Heroin, or opiate, withdrawal is the gold standard of addiction withdrawal. Imagine the worst flu of your life and then imagine knowing that taking a hit of this stuff will make it all better. Think sweats, fever, shaking, diarrhea, and some vomiting. Think excruciating pain throughout as your pain sensors get turned back on after being blocked for way too long. Now you have an abstract idea of the hell and it's no wonder why this has become the withdrawal every other withdrawal is judged against.
Withdrawal from crystal meth
Withdrawing from crystal meth use is nothing like opiate withdrawal and there's no reason why it would be. Opiates play a significant role in pain modulation and opioid receptors are present in peripheral systems in the body, which is the reason for the stomach aches, nausea, and diarrhea. Dopamine receptors just don't play those roles in the body and brain, so withdrawal shouldn't be expected to have the same effect.
But dopamine is still a very important neurotransmitter and quitting a drug that has driven up dopamine release for a long time should be expected to leave behind some pain, and it does.
One of the important functions of dopamine is in signaling reward activity. When a dopamine spike happens in a specific area of the brain (called the NAc), it signifies that whatever is happening at that moment is "surprisingly" good. The parentheses are there to remind you that the brain doesn't really get surprised, but the dopamine spike is like a reward signal detector—when it goes up, good things are happening.
Well guess what? When a crystal-meth addict stops taking meth, the levels of dopamine in the brain go down. To make matters worse, the long-term meth use has caused a decrease in the number of dopamine receptors available which means there's not only less dopamine, but fewer receptors to activate. It's not a surprise then that people who quit meth find themselves in a state of anhedonia, or an inability to feel pleasure. Once again, unlike the heroin withdrawal symptoms, anhedonia doesn't make you throw up and sweat, but it's a pretty horrible state to be in. Things that bring a smile to a normal person's face just don't work on most crystal-meth addicts who are new to recovery. As if that wasn't bad enough, it can take as long as two years of staying clean for the dopamine function of an ex meth-addict to look anything like a normal person's.
This anhedonia state can often lead to relapse in newly recovered addicts who are simply too depressed to go on living without a drug that they know can bring back a sense of normalcy to their life. The use of crystal-meth causes the sought-after spike in dopamine levels that helps relieve that anhedonic state.
When it comes to more physiological sort of withdrawal symptoms, the meth addict doesn't have it that bad, I guess. After an extended period of sleep deprivation and appetite suppression that are some of the most predictable effects of meth, the average addict will do little more than sleep and eat for the first week, or even two, after quitting the drug. Many addicts experience substantial weight gain during this period as their metabolism slows and their caloric intake increases greatly. Like everything else, this too shall pass. With time, most addicts' metabolism return to pre-use levels and their appetite catches up and returns to normal as well. Still, there's no doubt that a little exercise can help many addicts in early recovery steer their bodies back on track.
There's some research being talked about around the UCLA circles to see if detoxification from meth may help people do better in drug treatment. Detox before treatment is an accepted fact in opiate and benzodiazepine addiction, but because of the supposedly "light" nature of meth withdrawal, it's been ignored. Hopefully, by now, you realize that was a mistake.
© 2010 Adi Jaffe, All Rights Reserved.
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