Today we celebrate 30,000 members here at r/StopSpeeding.

The sub was started in early February of 2016. Over the course of seven years, it’s experienced a substantial amount of growth with a large and progressively faster increase of new members joining between 2020 to present day - For a community that serves a relatively small niche of the recoverysphere and is about as hard to find your way into as a wardrobe to Narnia, this shows there’s a need for it. Recovery resources exclusive to stimulant users are extremely limited and as the demand for them has grown, more people have shown up here.

Based on the current stimulant drug landscape and what we’ve seen out in the world over the past two years, I expect that need to continue to grow exponentially. As the need grows, our need for community support via its members is going to grow right along with it. I’d like to thank everyone who’s reading this for being a part of the sub, every single comment or post adds identification or support or shared experience for others. As you start to get better yourselves, by all means please stick around. We need you. Newly arriving people struggling like we all have need you.

In terms of what we’re dealing with the most, the top keyword for the sub via the available stats we can pull is “80mg” at 5,225 times mentioned and the third is “dextroamphetamine” at 3,658. While that’s heavily loaded in favor of stimulant medications, the progression of it to other types like meth via the pressed pills boom or just straight meth due to it being cheaper and widely available is beyond evident. Regardless of which stimulant brought you here, it advances absolutely to more and more desperate use over time unless arrested via recovery efforts. We’re all in this together, which flavor of speed a person is doing at present time isn’t all that important, we’ve found a whole lot more similarities than differences between members regardless of which stimulant flavor they’re struggling with. Fellowship based in commonalities is a tremendous asset for those seeking peer support in recovery and the more we provide, the better.

StopSpeeding has had a lot of mods and contributors over the years, all of whom were vital in the continued growth and maintenance of the sub and the Discord. It has been an integral part of my own continued recovery, it’s an honor and a privilege to assist the community, I know other members who have contributed feel the same. I’d also like to recognize the person who started this whole thing - He is a dear friend and a testament to what a desire to help others can ripple out into. You don’t need to have all the answers yourself to give what you’ve got to people who need it and he did that. The more people who do the same, the better chances we’ve got at making a difference in more lives impacted by addiction and substance abuse.

Things are not getting better out there. Fentanyl is a horseman of the drug apocalypse and it’s in everything. The shit people are buying online is everything and anything but what it’s being sold as. There has never been a time in human history where drug use has been as dangerous as it is now. The days when addicts had twenty years to fuck around before hitting bottom and cleaning up? Gone. You’re lucky if you make it five before catching bad gear, it’s a minefield the likes we’ve never seen before and it’s getting worse by the day. Addiction is becoming more and more prevalent in the younger population and it will continue that trend. Rock bottom is no longer an inevitability, it’s a luxury that many will never have the good fortune of hitting. When a person does reach out here for help, that might be the first and last time that window for a chance at recovery opens. What we do to help them when it does can be the difference between life and death. The professional sector is abysmal at present time and addiction resources are woefully inadequate, underfunded, undermanned and undersupported by our governments. Nobody is coming to save us. We’re all we got.

Regardless of where you’re at in your own recovery efforts, you are welcome, valued, appreciated and needed here. We wouldn’t be here if we could do it alone and who would want to anyway? Addiction isolates us. Recovery gives us an opportunity to find others like ourselves who can relate to our experiences, and we can relate to theirs. In those connections, we can find help in getting out of addiction ourselves and then help the next person who comes along the same way we were helped.

Thank you for continuing to be a part of this community.