Oxycontin Addiction

The powerful prescription pain reliever has become a hot new street drug that has resulted in more than 120 deaths nationwide. It will give you a high much like HIGH GRADE heroin but with worse consequences. 5mg of OXY has has as much active ingredient (oxycodone) as One percocet. So chewing/snorting a 40mg OXY is like taking 8 percocets at once or a 80mg Oxy is like taking 16 percocets all at once. Overdose Symptoms: Slow breathing, seizures, dizziness, weakness, loss of consciousness, coma, confusion, tiredness, cold and clammy skin, and small pupils.

OxyContin should be used to fight extreme pain. Doctors commonly prescribe it to cancer patients as an alternative to morphine. The drug is addictive, expensive, and when misused, it can be lethal. OxyContin addiction is becoming an epidemic in several rural states.

Physical dependence, which is sometimes unavoidable, develops when an individual is exposed to a drug at a high enough dose for long enough that the body adapts and develops a tolerance for the drug. This means that higher doses are needed to achieve a drug's original effects. If the patient stops taking the drug, withdrawal will occur. Just like heroin it is almost impossible to do alone as the withdrawal symptoms of OxyContin addiction are worse than heroin and last longer. Professional help from a heroin detox center is the best and safest way to do this but there is NO painless way.

Drug craving is the result of the drug's imprinting in the memory of a pleasant association of euphoria with the drug. The subconscious memory then motivates the individual to seek this drug because of the false imprint. The brain, in effect, has been trained that using the drug is the fastest way to feel good. This learning process then produces a new appetite or drive to seek the drug which we call craving. This craving is most often activated by, a) memory of pleasure, b) when we feel bad and have a habit of using the drug to rapidly feel good, c) when we are in a situation with people, places and activities in which a previous habit pattern of drug use has been established.

Prescription drugs, like other addictive drugs, are able to short-circuit your survival system by artificially stimulating the reward center, or pleasure areas in your brain, without anything beneficial happening to your body. As this happens, it leads to increased confidence in the drug, and less confidence in the normal rewards of life. This first happens on a physical level. Then, it affects you psychologically. The big drug lie results in decreased interest in other aspects of life, as you increase your reliance and interest in the drug. People, places and activities involved with using drugs become more important. People, places and activities or lifestyles that worked through your normal reward system, before using the drug, become less important to you. After a while, a heavy drug user will actually resent people, places, and activities that do not fit in with that drug use.

Addictive drugs mimic the action of chemicals your brain produces to send messages of pleasure to your brain's reward center. They produce an artificial feeling of pleasure. Most addictive drugs are able to produce pleasurable effects by chemically acting like certain normal brain messenger chemicals, which produce positive feelings in response to signals from the brain.

The result is a dependence on the immediate, fast, predictable drug which, at the same time, short circuits interests in and the motivation to make life's normal rewards work. More and more confidence is placed in the drug while other survival feelings are ignored and bypassed. The result of this addiction cycle is a lack of concern for, and confidence in, other areas of life.