Welcome to Stop Speeding. If you clicked this, you’re probably at some point of desperate misery in your struggles with substance abuse and don’t want to do this shit anymore. Congratulations, you have been granted a brief moment of sanity while in the throes of active addiction.

“So what the fuck do I do now?”

Great question. You probably can’t quit alone, if you could spontaneously recover yourself you would have done it already.

“But what about that two months where I did quit by myself?”

What about the five to ten years on either side of that two months where you couldn’t?

“Right. Okay, so I probably need some help. How do I get some?”

There’s as many different recovery paths as there are addicts. These are just some of the ways. Mix and match, add and subtract, shift and sort, do whatever it takes to get and stay clean.

The Start

Get rid of your drugs. All of them. If you really want to roll the dice and try to be the 1% or whatever of addicts that can do one or two drugs successfully when they couldn’t do another one, shine on you crazy diamond. Every recovery program and treatment center and addiction professional is going to tell you that abstinence is recovery. Maybe test yours by trying to smoke weed or drink or do peyote or shrooms or whatever after you have some first. Demi Lovato and ‘sober influencers’ on TikTok, probably not world authorities on addiction or recovery. Ditch your gear, too. No, don’t hold on to it to give it to someone else, we all tried that. We don’t need addiction heirloom pieces. Just smash the shit, throw it away.

Cut your sources. People who can get you high are not your friends, not anymore. Maybe later. Not now. Your boo uses? Consider a reality wherein there’s no way in hell you get and stay clean in any relationship, much less one with another drug user or addict. Ask your sources not to sell to you. Block and exile them. Get a new phone number. Blank your socials. Leave drug places online. If you have medical sources, tell them you’re an addict, ask them to cut you off. Do whatever you have to do in terms of practical measures to put as much distance between you and substances as possible. Yes, it’s very easy to get drugs anywhere and everywhere. Make it less easy.

Sit down, take a deep breath, think about where you’re at in life at present time and ask yourself if you are ready to engage in a process that’s one of the most difficult things a person can undertake within the human experience. You’re going to withdraw, it’s probably going to be a while for a return to baseline, you may have to drop some life balls you were trying to juggle, you may have to take some steps back to eventually move forward, you may have to get honest with people you don’t want to be honest with. If you are not prepared to chase recovery harder than you chased getting high, your chances of success will reflect that. Probably going to have to do an enormous amount of things you don’t want to do if you want to achieve long term recovery.

If you’re not willing to do all of that, you can probably stop reading now because that’s like, the first day. Maybe you require more research. Go make merry and come back later when you’ve suffered enough.

Still here? Coming back? Great! Let’s move on.

The Help

The early stages of recovery help and recovery help in general are split into three types - Programs, resources and professionals.

This is a link that breaks down lists of these and ways to find them. For professional resources outside of the United States, you can likely do some research on your own to find what’s available to you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StopSpeeding/comments/xhaxwt/recovery_programs_resources_list/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Detox
Some people require a formal supervised and perhaps even medicated detox process. These are facilitated by professionals at state and private facilities. It isn’t a requirement for most stimulant addicts and some may have a hard time even getting in if their only substance is stimulants. Call admissions and ask. Some take Medicaid and trash insurance, some don’t. Some are included with rehab and treatment. They will end a run for you if you can’t stop yourself long enough to drag yourself into other options, or serve as a nice bridge to rehab / treatment / entry into a program.

Rehab & Treatment
If you have money, people with money, decent insurance or want to hang out in a totally sweet state facility, you can opt for rehab / treatment. These come in a variety of flavors. Please keep in mind that it can be harder to get into professional treatment with stimulant addictions, especially if it’s not meth or cocaine.

Intensive Outpatient Treatment is very popular these days and covered by more insurance plans, out of pocket it can run around $300 a day and goes on for a fixed number of weeks, usually however many you can afford or your insurance allows. IOPs can offer medication management, urinalysis, process groups, one on one counseling, CBT / DBT, twelve step facilitation and all the best practices of inpatient treatment without living there. You spend half the day or so there and then go home, wherever home is. If you’re not serious about getting clean, don’t waste your time with an IOP because they only babysit you a few hours of the day and you have to go find other ways to stay clean for the rest of them.

Inpatient Treatment & Rehab is generally either short term or long term with different amounts of time defining each. 30, 60, 90 day trips aren’t uncommon. You live there and they keep you from using drugs. Most of the time. Some offer longer stays for more serious cases. Some specialize in dual diagnosis, mental health issues along with substance abuse issues. There’s private and then there’s state, sometimes federally subsidized. Private is expensive. You’d better have good insurance, $6,000-$20,000, family with money or be able to sneak in on a scholarship. Scholarships can be discussed with admissions. Some private and most state will take Medicaid or trash insurance, but please keep in mind that places that do tend to reflect this in the quality of life there and recovery offerings available. Residential treatment is another type that tends to be longer than inpatient and offers more freedom than inpatient - Different places offer different options, call around and see what insurance will cover and what you can afford.

Many of these are partially or entirely based on twelve step ideologies and offer what’s referred to as “twelve step facilitation” - Essentially a treatment and strictly not-as-good version of the very free Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous programs. They can also include things like CBT, DBT, relapse prevention skill building, counseling, medication management, assorted therapies, etc. Rehab and treatment offers you a basic education on addiction and babysits you for the duration of your stay, sometimes long enough to get your marbles back. They do nothing to keep you clean once you leave. If you do not engage in aftercare, which we’ll get to later, you will probably be going back to active addiction and back to treatment again at some point in the future. 40-60% relapse within 30 days after leaving. Don’t fuck around while you’re there, don’t fuck anybody or start dating anyone while you’re there, try to get something out of it.

No treatment center or rehab is going to take an addict who doesn’t want to get and stay clean and turn them into an addict that stays clean. If you’re going to appease people, if you’re going to avoid consequences, if you’re going to try to be convinced to recover or are of the mind that’s their job, you’re taking a very expensive and uncomfortable vacation that you’ll probably check yourself out of early or AMA. It’s a business. You’re a customer. They’re selling you a product. If you don’t use the product, that’s on you.

The wastes are littered with addicts who went to rehab 20 times and still aren’t clean because they didn’t give a shit or it wasn’t the right solution for them. From inpatient or residential, people can move on to sober housing or additional resources which can usually be discussed with staff who will hook you up with options and let you know what’s available.

Recovery Programs
Programs are the other half of the recovery coin. One can forgo professional treatment altogether and opt for these, bridge into them after treatment, combine them, etc. These are free group-based meetings and communities of people who struggle with addictions. All have online meetings available but in-person are strongly preferred. There are many, and all are great - See the previously listed link for all of them - but the most prevalent and efficacious are Twelve Steps programs and SMART Recovery.

Twelve Steps programs available that reasonably cater to stimulant addicts are Narcotics Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous (you have to say you’re an alcoholic, just pretend) and Dual Recovery Anonymous. You can attend as many or as few of these as you want, qualify for. These programs originated in 1935 with AA and are centered around attending meetings with other addicts, listening, sharing, socializing, networking and going through the Twelve Steps with a sponsor. There is a spiritual, not religious component to these programs that can turn some people off, but they are widely available and graded out with the most efficacy of any available options in a 2020 Cochrane study that was the largest and most comprehensive recovery review in human history. Not for everybody, not the only way or the best way for everyone and there’s plenty of dissenters to twelve step ideology but this is the most common form of “aftercare” post-treatment and the backbone of many recovering addicts’ short and long term recovery efforts. I got clean in NA, it was totally rad.

Please work a full program if you go, don’t just fucking sit there and scowl refusing to get a sponsor or not doing anything you don’t want to do or not writing the steps - You will not recover via osmosis, and if you haven’t written the steps to completion, you have not “tried” a twelve steps program as it is a twelve steps program - Not a meetings program. You don’t sit in a booth at Burger King without eating any food and say you tried Burger King, hated Burger King. You really have to do a lot of of work in the A’s. Meetings, steps, service. If you can get clean doing less, go do it. If you can’t, go here and do all of it.

SMART Recovery is the most popular alternative to the twelve steps and is science and evidence based, teaches skills and utilizes CBT / DBT geared to addiction in order to help people. There is no spiritual or ingrained community aspect to SMART, and most prefer it that way. You attend meetings, talk, learn some skills and best practices. If you’ve attended IOPs that have group therapies or process groups with CBT integrated, you’ll recognize a lot of SMART from that. It pairs extremely well with other programs including the As, offering a very practical and psych-minded approach, whereas the vast majority of the others contain some sort of spiritual trimmings.

Honorable mention goes to Recovery Dharma / Refuge Recovery, another fantastic ideology based on Buddhism that many swear by. Try one, try several. Programs are free, what do you have to lose?

Addiction Counseling, Therapy & Psychiatry
These three tend to be part of most people’s recovery stories at some point to some degree. Some can get by on these alone, most require something specifically geared to recovery in order to actually recover - However, these can be invaluable and necessary pieces of the puzzle for addicts, especially those who are dual diagnosis or have underlying traumas and issues that may contribute to their substance abuse. There are many types of therapy, many types of counseling and many types of psychiatry approaches. Some opt to start here, some opt to mix it in with other approaches, some go to these after they’ve become established in recovery for a minute. Providers who have a specific background in addiction are highly preferred and often list these specialities in their profiles. Many therapists and counselors offer telehealth options now so it’s easier now to find good options wherever you live. There is no medication that will cure addiction. There is no substance that you can take that will make you no longer be an addict. That doesn’t exist, stop looking for it. Addiction is more than brain chemicals and stuff that happened to you. If that’s all addiction was, medication and therapy would cure everyone’s addictions and nobody would die ever. You probably have to do some other stuff. If you go into these options with that in mind, you might really get something out of them.

There will never be a point in most addicts’ lives where they do not require some sort of dedicated recovery action. Addiction doesn’t get cured and we can always go back regardless of how long we stay clean. Best we’ve been able to do with this stuff is keep it in remission. When we get complacent or start tricking off, that’s when we set ourselves up for relapse. By all means, don’t fuck around and find out by bailing on what got you clean as soon as you get comfortable.

The Life

A lot of people require wholesale life changes in order to stay clean long term. Can’t expect to walk into recovery, do some shit, walk out back into your old life and maintain sobriety doing the same things you did before. In addition to aftercare and long term recovery maintenance, it’s often recommended to change up your people, your places and your things.

Might need to change your entire social circle, might need to detach from some family, might need to remove yourself from an environment, might need to change careers. Who knows. It’s different for everyone. Taking care of one’s mental and physical health becomes paramount in recovery, as does maintaining good interpersonal relationships and working to minimize stress, drama, negativity, unhappiness. Fix your damn teeth. Go to the doctor. Get your heart checked out. Check for how many STDs and Hepatitises you got. Meditation helps. Yoga helps. Exercise and diet helps. Hobbies help. Don’t isolate or alienate or fall back into old patterns and behaviors. Don’t live dirty while you’re clean from drugs, it will take your ass directly back to drugs. Make some friends, ideally ones that don’t do drugs and whose inclusion in your life is a plus and not a minus - Vice versa as well. Build a life that looks like a normal happy human life if you want to masquerade as a normal happy human, addict. We have to fit in with these clowns now. Might as well do the stuff they do.

Please, do not try and date in your first year of recovery. Please. Ask anyone anywhere and they’ll tell you the same thing. Just don’t do it. Dating in early recovery is a meme and you don’t want to be a meme. Your chances of success go up by like 50% if you just don’t fuck around until you’re capable of doing it in a borderline healthy way once your recovery is on solid ground. Speed addicts have more sex than anyone. You’ve had enough. Chill the fuck out and give your genitals a break, they’ll still be there in 365 days.

An often overlooked component to how people change their lives in recovery is helping others. When you make yourself of service to others in your community, via recovery programs or volunteering or any positive selfless act meant to improve the lives of others, you get outside of yourself - Which is what tends to be a big part of the problem for a lot of us. By helping others, we help ourselves and we feel better about ourselves doing it. It’s the core of many recovery programs and something a person can do regardless of how they opt to get clean that will pay you back in ways you can’t even imagine. Grateful addicts don’t use, and it’s a lot easier to be grateful for the lot you’ve got in life if you spend a good portion of it dedicated to helping other folks. The meaning of life is probably not self-fulfillment via self-satisfaction and an infallible focus on one’s own happiness, feelings and success. Just throwing that out there.

You can volunteer at shelters, food banks, in harm reduction, all kinds of options available. This website is a great source of finding local opportunities to help out as well:

https://www.volunteermatch.org/

As previously mentioned, this is not an exhaustive guide or an all-inclusive listing of what’s available in terms of recovery paths or options. Many books have been written on recovery things and you should probably go read some. One thing I know to be absolutely true is this - If you build your life on recovery, build it out from recovery as it’s established with recovery as your foundation, you give yourself one hell of a good shot to make it. Trying to squeeze recovery into your existing life with no concessions or changes or into a life that’s centered around other stuff that doesn’t prioritize it, that’s where a lot of people tend to falter. Many of us effectively built our lives around drugs and can absolutely rebuild them back around drugs again if the house we put together after we get clean isn’t sturdy enough where it counts to endure some of the natural disasters life is going to throw at it.

Good luck in your recovery efforts. Everyone here is rooting for you and this community is an excellent place to share experiences and support one another. Don’t sit back and lurk if you’re struggling. Talk. Post. Share your story. Get it out there. Take the first steps.

Ask for help. It’s what we’re here for.