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Two months ago, I checked into a detox facility to get clean from heroin. How I ended up using is a long story, but I've had this problem for over three years. Now, I was finally ready to do what I needed to do to not only stay clean, but to get away from the FOO. However, I don't know if the approach used in the facility I went to is that conducive to recovery. After a few days in detox, I transferred to a rehab facility where you stay until they can find you a place in a halfway house(which I wanted). It was an all-women's program on the top floor of a hospital. There were 20-something women all cooped up in that ward, unable to go outside very often. We were fed hospital food and not allowed to have food brought in(although some staff would look the other way). Since I have a lot of texture and taste issues(and always have), I pretty much lived off of apples and peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches for five weeks. Every morning you'd get woken up by some harpy turning the lights on shrieking "Good morning, ladiiiiieeeees!!". There were several "group sessions" throughout the day, heralded by staff shrieking "Group time, ladiiiiiiieees!!". There was a lot of "female empowerment" garbage. Like we were so awesome because we're women...nevermind that many of these women were virtually MGTOW fodder. Many of them were planning to dump their boyfriends/husbands as soon as they were out of rehab, but in the meantime, had no problem accepting money/gifts/emotional support from their poor white knights. Screaming matches between women were a regular thing, and occasionally, they were able to goad some of the female staff into similar fights. I finally got released to a halfway house, where I'm relatively happy for now. I'll be going back to work soon, and plan to re-enroll in school. But I'm still bothered by my experience in that hospital There's a certain atmosphere of clients being treated like children, which I don't understand for the life of me. Is the belief that because people were abusing drugs, that they lost the right to be treated with a certain dignity? It's a well-known statistic among people in recovery that a significant amount of people relapse early on, and I wonder if it's because of the way clients in rehab are treated? But I don't know how it should be changed. Any thoughts? Are there any other folks here who have dealt with addiction and treatment?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/11/lsd-impact-brain-revealed-groundbreaking-images We've got this great tool for self knowledge, yet even this very community is afraid to discuss it because of some irrational fear of "drugs". Meanwhile you take things far more dangerous than LSD like caffeine, nicotine, processed sugars, etc. The lethal dose of LSD would cost millions of dollars, yet it's somehow the most feared by the DEA. Speaking of dosages, according to what I have read, the 75mcg they used in this study is considered below the threshold to even be felt. Some users reportedly take 10-100 times that much. So really, the research has just begun. I feel like it is very dismissive to just say that people who use "drugs" had bad childhoods, when in reality the "drugs" can have a very positive effect and they may have came to them for reasons of self expansion, not self abuse as has been asserted countless times on the show. Why should we limit ourselves to this single animistic brain pattern when there are potentially millions of different "modes" possible with the right chemicals? Why are you too scared to discuss it when it could be the key to unlocking peoples traumatized minds? As someone who has been vilified on this forum for even speaking to the subject, this study vindicates my conscience. If there was a single drug that could cure statism, would it not be the most highly regulated substance in a state? Well, LSD by weight and penalty is by far the most regulated substance, even ahead of nuclear material.. Why do they want to keep people away from it so bad?

There is so much that can be taken from this simple video, especially the hope it inspires for those looking to resolve their impulsive behaviors.

New research is showing the Hitler and other "high" Nazis (pun intended) used opiates on a regular basis. These new findings fit well with "The Origins of War in Child Abuse" and the recent interviews with Dr.Gabor Mate wherein he reveals that almost of the addicts he treats were abused as children. All the more reason to treat your children with love and empathy.

Since I have been listening to Freedomain Radio I have been experiencing a great conflict between my desire for true, connected relationships and the relationships I currently have with my peers, as well as my parents. (maybe there should be a warning label somewhere, I don't know...) This conflict has only recently hit home, that it is 'one or the other' so to speak. So a couple of days ago it was a friends 20th birthday party. And whilst 'speaking' with the peer group that day, I found that all i could focus on was that anything that I truly cared about or wanted to say, could not be spoken to these people. Not because I would necessarily get attacked, but probably minimised. And it saddens me to say that all the people who I know and hang out with, have highly evolved methods of dissociating from uncomfortable topics, or really anything of substance. The theme of the night was MDMA. I told myself that I would not take any but I think that night I was confronted with the 'either-or'. I could choose the illusions of my current relationships, or myself, and I have become very alarmed (after giving my motivations some thought) that I chose the illusions and to take the drug. It has become horrifyingly clear, that I am living a double life within myself. I am living the life of illusions without the pleasure of illusion. I am making some progress in the realm of self-knowledge - having almost completed Nathaniel Brandons' sentence completion program for self-esteem - and am making progress towards my career goals but am stuck with the knowledge that I am failing in my pursuit of relationships composed of honesty. I am planning to move to London soon to enrol as a sound engineering student at a college in the area. When I do I intend to attend the freedomain radio meetup group there. Not to 'dump' on anyone, but at this point I think I need people who I can have a genuine interaction with. I feel like a siren of wisdom in an echo chamber right now. So I suppose my question is; 'given that I know I am am in dead end, unconnected relationships and that I know that I need to leave them soon, for myself, what now? And what might I expect?'. Any and all questions are welcome and I appreciate your time.

Good news everyone, the same people who brought us adhd and oppositional defiance disorder or odd have come up with yet another illness to explain the normal human reaction to extreme circumstances. This new “illness” is called Orthorexia Nervosa. It is defined as the irrational obsession with obtaining the perfect diet. The article I read describes a common case as follows. “Often times people with the disorder will completely cut artificial food coloring, sweeteners, and other chemically treated food additives. They even may go as fare as refusing to eat gmo foods”. The article concluded with saying something along the lines of, “it is clearly a mental illness, because these food items have been tested and retested by the FDA and have been found to be completely safe”. I just wonder what drugs the RX industry will push to quall this new epidemic of healthy eaters it has on its hands. Will it be uppers as in the case of ADD and ADHD? Will it be a heavily synthesized opiate as in the case of the admittedly fake restless leg syndrome? Or will it be a SSRI like drug that makes you just not care anymore. What ever the case may be they will surly find a way to make a profit from this.

"Adolf" had a traumatic childhood which caused him to, in adult life, have a resting happiness level far below that of a mentally healthy person. He has an almost incessant urge to escape his state of mind. He tried some psychoactive drugs and they temporarily elevated his happiness level to a comfortable level. He uses soft drugs to increase his time-average happiness level at a moderate frequency. He inhales cannabis smoke about once every two weeks and takes an MDMA tablet every three or four months. The cannabis is not mixed with tobacco and the MDMA is pure, as determined by the results of a drug-testing kit. If you had been friends with Adolf for two years, would you want him to stop? Would you actually confront him to ask him to stop? In my opinion, the drug use is detrimental to his health in the long run. However, the short-term effects are remarkably positive. He has been almost continuously happy, more calm, less prone to bursts of anger and much, much more empathetic with others. All drugs have their dangers, and dependencies can make people do horrible things to other people. Is it up to us whether Adolf benefits in the long term or in the short term? If we ask him to stop, would we be overshadowing his childhood trauma?

Let me start by saying that I am 21 and my brother is only 17 years old. He has been in and out of local police stations for the past two years and just got out of a juvenile detention center that practiced military style "teaching" as it was also a place where kids could finish high school courses if they dropped out of school prior to being thrown in there. It makes me sick every time I think about him being in there. My brother, Anthony, was always the shy quiet kid that would only say something when he felt he really needed to add something to the conversation. He was incredibly bright, he still is in my opinion, and funny as well which really made our childhoods a tiny bit more bearable. In my modest opinion, Anthony and I are very similar in that we have perfected the "humor to get out of uncomfortable situations" type thing that I know a lot of people also experience, so we have always had our humor to comfort us and find us a lot of friends. And for a long time us joking around with each other was the only thing we had and the only way that we could bond. We were never really "close" but we would try to find tiny moments to be comforted by each other. Feel free to ask any questions about that if you want. More to the point, a couple years ago he kind of lost it. He started failing all of his classes (not that I care much for public school), he began to act very much like our dad, he stopped caring about virtually everything, and he started smoking pot. Like constantly. The worst part about it for me was that I could see him slowly becoming my dad in the way he would just stare blankly at you when you tried to talk to him about serious things, the way he would just completely give up any sense of empathy, or the worst of all was the way he would talk down to, scream at, threaten and totally degrade my mother to the point where I was the only person she could actually talk to. And boy did she talk to me.... I mean for hours at a time sometimes she would just get on these rants about how dad is horrible or how Anthony is going down the "wrong path" or how her boss at work is incompetent and makes her life miserable. And I would be stuck there not being able to leave or tell her that I really don't have the emotional capacity to hold all of my crap let alone with all her crap. Anyway, off the tangent now please. So the whole pot smoking phase didn't alarm me as much as it did with my mom of course, because to her it was only about my brother breaking the law, but with me I knew why he was doing it and that was when I really tried to connect with him more so he could have someone to talk to. I know it was kind of late for me to do that, but I will admit this right up front, I was not the best sister to him. I never did anything bad to him, but I do feel like I should have been there more for him emotionally and physically. But you have to understand, everything in my brain was constantly telling me to find ways to get out of the house and away from the craziness by sleeping over at friend's houses or finding things to do at school or I even took church activities over my family. Yep that's right, we were raised Christian, imagine that. As if that didn't help my brother's insane childhood. He got into some pretty deep shit putting it mildly. He was constantly breaking parole and always going out getting stoned and coming home smelling like alcohol or wandering the streets with his friends. I got pretty worried about him when I began to notice it was escalating to the point where he was being picked up my cops or having to do summer school. Finally it came to him breaking into his high school with his friends and stealing food from the concession stands and smoking in the cafeteria. He was thrown into the detention center and I couldn't see him for close to 8 months... My brother. I wasn't allowed to see my own brother for 8 months. Now my parents were able to see him, but not me. He got out this past month and I was finally able to take off from work to go back down to my home town and see him. I brought games because games always made us happier and because he couldn't leave the house. He still had his ankle bracelet on so he was confined. And when I called him about one week prior, he sounded really excited to see me. He said, "I don't care what we do, I just want to hang with you. We could just stare at the stars for all I care, just as long as you come down". I remember that because it made me feel so happy and hopeful about forming an actual sibling relationship with him at some point down the road. So I get all excited driving down there because my mom just called me and told me Anthony keeps asking about when I was coming down. Of course when she told me he'd been up since like 6 am(that's what time his officers woke him up every day, so he just naturally wakes up that early and I didn't think about that) and has been waiting for me to get there for so long it made me feel like I failed him yet again and wasn't a good sister to him. It was around noon when my mom called and if I had thought about him waking up so early, I would have gotten there by like 9 or so. So the second I open the door he is sitting on the couch and I say hi and smile and all that and he gave me a slight grin of sorts; nothing that says he was truly happy to see me. I was a little hurt by his lack of enthusiasm but I figured he was a little upset by how late I got there. So I walked over to him and sat down on the couch next to him and tried to talk to him but he couldn't take his eyes away from his phone long enough to give me an actual greeting. He continued with this cold and indifferent sentiment virtually the entire time I was there. I asked him if he wanted to play a game with me and he said no. So I asked him if he wanted to go outside and he said no. He turned down every single one of my ideas. Finally when I asked him if he had any ideas, he sounded really annoyed and told me that there's nothing to do in the house. He sounded depressed. I was pretty understandable about his emotional state. What he was doing and how he was treating me was extremely hurtful since that's exactly the way my dad used to treat me, like he'd rather just not have me there or something. So I asked my mom if she wanted to play, hoping that if Anthony saw us playing and having a good time, he'd loosen up a bit and come join us. And there was a moment when he leaned off the couch to get a better look and his expression lightened so I asked him if he'd like to join since the game is better played with three people instead of two but he immediately leaned back in his seat and said no. Then my mom caught the disappointment on my face and asked him why I even came down if he wasn't going to interact with me. And that I came down just to see and spend time with him. Then his reply was "I don't know why she came down, she should just go home I guess." It pretty much killed me. I cried all the way home and had a very emotional conversation with my boyfriend about it as well. I was hoping for some advice on how to handle this complex "relationship", if you can call it that. I am going down to my house again in a week and I honestly don't know if I should just keep plugging away at improving our relationship or if I should just let it be for now. If anyone has a similar situation that could help me figure things out it would be most helpful. Thank you for reading all of this. It is very personal and I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me.

Tried to post this yesterday (so its actually day two now) but connection was poor so I'll post it now: Just got through podcasts 830-833 and a quote really resonated with me when Stef speaks about a listener who criticises Christina's (spelling?) general stance against using drugs and alcohol. Stef basically says "She's into people living in reality and drugs distort your relationship to reality.". Until today my routine has been to get off work, go home, smoke a bowl, play video games, go to bed. I dont drink as often as many people I know which is probably a higher amount of people than most considering I work in the bar industry and alcoholism runs in my family, some times ill just have beer or two but the times I drink to get drunk, I get drunk fast, i become even more socially akward, i throw up and fail to remember things the next day while also feeling like absolute shit. I also dont have very much fun usually when Im drinking because, as Stef says in the podcasts mentioned above, it kinda hollows you out and nothing substantial can really be discussed or related to especially considering the people your with are probably not exactly philosophers. I'm always tired and I RARELY do anything productive. I have a shitty job. My house is a mess. I never have any money and there is a list a mile long of things I need to do but keep putting off, mostly because I have no money and its just easier to go home and get high and play video games. The list goes on. I'm twenty eight and I have a son whos mother is very controlling and strictly limits my time with my son which is exteremely hard on him as she has him in a catholic school and absolutely uses him as an emotional sponge but here I am doing nothing useful to fight it short of attempting to teach him about love and logic when he's with me for a few hours on the weekold. Anyways I could go on for hours about this but the point is that today I decided to forgo the weed. It was so tempting and I haven't thrown it in the garbage yet... It seems like a waste and I thought maybe I would give the leftovers to a friend but I should probably just flush it down the toilet... Anyways today is day one. Instead of going home to wallow in my sorrows I went to see a movie with my two little brothers, 13 and 15 years old respectively, hung out with them a bit and told them that I'm on day one of no drugs no alchoh, and then I went home, stared at the weed a bit but kept true to not smoking it, instead I downloaded the recent rogan/molyneux podcast I've been meaning to listen to, I shaved for the first time in three weeks and now I'm writing this post. I'll try to keep you posted but of course if I relapse (so to speak) I probably won't keep you posted... Anyways please wish me luck! Any advice or comments or criticisms of any kind are most welcome! Please be honest as fuck with me and don't pull any punches, my sons future may well depend on it.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/04/25/1-13-schoolkids-takes-psych-meds/

Yesterday, Daniel Mackler has announced that all four of his movies are now available for FREE on YouTube (including all subtitled versions). Highly recommended!More information can be found here: http://wildtruth.net/my-films-are-now-free-on-youtube/

I was born to drug addicts, crack for mom, heroin for dad. Dad was in and out (so to speak) for the early years of my life, he didn't become a concrete fixture until I was probably 5. One of my earliest memories was being sent with money into a crackhouse across the street from our apartment (we lived in subsidized housing aka Da projects) to get my moms drugs for her. "dont tell dad and dont look inside the package he gives you." It seems ridiculous to even try to defend that kind of a situation but I knew the house, my friend TJ lived there with his dad and his dads girlfriend. His dad was a crack dealer. My father as I said was strung out most of the time, he worked as a carpenter and also he beat people up for a small time loan shark. Another lovely childhood memory was sitting in my mothers lap in my dads car while he went to collect and the guy he was collecting from pulled a gun and traced it on my mother and I in the car. It was the 1st time I ever saw my father beat someone into the ground and take his wallet and gun. Then my brother Ricky was born, roughly around 6 or 7 months premature. Open heart surgery, collapsed lungs, messed up eardrums, so on and so forth, I was 4 or 5. All I knew was that my mother was dying, my new brother was sure to die, and my dad just dropped my off at random relatives homes. They tried to push religion on me at that time and even back then I could tell how incredibly bullshit it was. If there was a god, he would not be murdering my mom and my brother. Even now I think back on this stuff and I am overwhelmed with grief, christ help me when I hear the song "Over the rainbow" Which played in its awful 8bit glory on some crappy windup toy my Memere bought for Ricky. So much pain, so much misery. It was like I was collecting the interest off of the misery my parents bore. They both grew up in broken homes without fathers. My mothers father an alcoholic womanizer left the family when she was barely 8 and my fathers father an alcoholic WW2 veteran who bombed his mothers home city in Germany committed suicide by putting his head in a gas oven when my father was 10. My father and his brother my Uncle Dan, found him there dead. And these things of course terminally stained my parents minds. That is no excuse, just some background info. Ricky and mom did survive just barely, but we still all bear the scars. I feel traumatized by these things. Even now just nearly 33 years old. I feel helpless in the dark in the broken silent moments of night as I lay awake. Swimming in these memories and thoughts, love, anger, hatred and then guilt. SO much guilt. Guilt for the things I suffered, guilt for the things I have done in response. Guilt for being cold and hard towards my fellow man and my family after I survived such insane fucking reality. I could probably reduce most people along with myself to tears, there is so much of this shit. I recall vividly still being molested by a neighbor who lived next door. Another sadistic fucked up depraved drug addict. These are the kind of people our culture produced. I held that in for 30 years before I told anybody, by the time I told my mother she cried... she cried and cried and I stood there, cool and indifferent. Feeling guilty that this data would make her cry. Its why I didn't ever want to tell anybody, but the secret was literally tearing my mind apart after holding it for 20+ years. And in heated angry moments, shouting at my mother as she stared at me, eyes aghast in denial and incredulity all she could mutter was that life didn't come with instructions. Which is of course true, and also part manipulation. She is incapable of being responsible, and that only enrages me further. To the point where I will be standing over her berating her like her own mother should have been back then. Mom was stuck on illegal drugs at least until she began doctor shopping, and it is my belief that she had been on prescription drugs for the majority of my life. Dad got clean, I remember when it happened. I don't know what sparked it, no one ever told me. But one day I was sent off to live with my insane aunt Cindy in another ghetto, Ricky was sent off to stay with my aunt Sally and Colby our younger brother was sent off to stay with our fathers best friend and the only "Uncle" i ever knew Chuck. I dont remember how long it took but during this time I got really into my 1st real addiction. Nintendo. Well living in the ghetto is bad, not to a childs mind. There was certainly a lot of other kids to play with and being the 80s crack epidemic there was no shortage of skinny teenagers with pillow sacks filled with 5 dollar NES carts. I plunged head 1st into the 8 bit realities Miyamoto had constructed for me and it was there that I found some sort of semblance of normalcy. Mom and dad are fighting? Mario Brothers, Mom tried to stab dad with a kitchen knife? Legend of Zelda, Ricky nearly dead? Metroid. It was then I believe that I learned to pacify myself with fantasy and imagination. There wasnt much else to do. **** At this point I am very well aware dear readers how much jumping around I am doing, and I will try to bring this to a head in a bit, but I apologize in advance for the jittery nature... there is SO SO much dysfunction that its hard to just lay it all out in order, especially when much of this stuff happened to me before the age of 10. I was cursed / blessed with a very deep and vivid memory. All my life people have called me an information sponge. Anyway... Folks ended up getting clean, well sort of. Dad was and is still an Alcoholic and mom has been on narcotic prescriptions. They never got rid of the addictions, just the illegal aspect of fulfilling them. Thanks government! We ended up moving when I was in 3rd grade to a very nice town. They still live there to this day. It was a move I dont think I ever recovered from. I recall in the old hood having more friends than I could count. And while yes most of them are now dead or in jail i at least had people to talk to. In our new town I had a very very difficult time making friends. They just didn't get me. They all had cold lunches packed with care, and cute fluffy dogs and parents without drug addictions and solid jobs, they sat around and talked about the future and how their days went. Their moms and dads did their homework with them, they reminded me of everything I never had. Although I learned how to lie quite well about those things. How to deny to myself and others how horrible broken my family was. I even had people convinced that my life was better. but I secretly hated them, I despised them. I thought they were weak, and self centered. They wished their mothers and fathers dead for not buying them gameboys or for taking them on long boring trips to Florida to the beach... I have still never been to Florida. I became isolated. Obsessed with dark things, horror movies, monsters, demons, guns, and death. I projected myself into dark antihero roles like the Punisher, Blade or Ghost Rider. Because Superman was a bitch, when the hell did superman ever suffer? He was not a real hero. Its not hard to be a hero when you're indestructible. I liked antiheroes. Dark heroes. People who were broken like me who didn't just want to save the innocents like children from dark forces but who wanted to take those dark forces and torture them. Not jail them. Torture them. Cut their skin off piece by piece, give them an IV so they wouldn't die so I could prolong the torture. I realized I was sick. I kept myself, to myself. Even today, if I ever came across that guy who molested me as a kid. I would kidnap him and torture him until he begged me to end his life, and then I would prolong it even longer. This is the result of holding in anger like poison for an entire life. You stare into the void and eventually the void stares back into you. I cannot deny this part of myself. It is a stain that has lasted all my life. And it has spilled into every facet of that life. People know me as dark minded, maybe evil. But not chaotic evil, more of a lawful evil. Its not true of course, in fact I don't want to hurt anybody and it was those feelings that made me cling to rationality. Like benchmarks of land in a sea of molten fiery emotions that I could navigate from. Bless Marcus Aurelius for introducing me to Stoicism. If I hadn't figured out how to get my feelings in check, I would have turned mass murderer long ago. It didn't help that talking was just something we didn't do at home. To my parents talking meant they talked and I did what they said. Which lead me to my 1st survival instinct in life. Never tell mom or dad anything. I still abide by this. ***** Now to the crux of this screed, I am fully aware now of how broken my emotional background is. I haven't even let but a drip of the hellish soul crushing damnation of my life out here... in fact I don't even know how I could. We would need 33 years worth of text to get a scope of my life. But I come to the conclusion that my feelings are out of control. Which is why I so tightly clamp down on them. But the clampage manifests in other ways, anxiety, rage, random crying etc. And hatred... so much hatred, the wounded broken heart of a small boy who was failed by every institution that was supposed to protect him. How do you square with the toxic cocktail of hatred and love? The love of consciousness, the love of what little family I had, the longing for a time when things were simpler, when were were broken but together. Now that we are all older and rarely see one and other it weighs heavily on me. We all love each other but cannot say it, we hate each other but wont say it... I don't know how I should feel anymore. Once I broke free from the mind mold of my control freak parents especially Dad, I felt adrift in an ocean of confusion. Is this just adulthood? Why do I hate and love everything? Why do I want to see everything burn but fight these feelings back in the name of reason? I feel like a collapsing star being held up by that last bastion of nuclear forces as the gravity of reality crushes me in all directions. I am paralyzed with thoughts and indecision. Thanks for reading.

i've been struggling with lack of motivation, depression and paralyzing anxiety, to the point of non functioning in my day to day life. I have made a little headway on resolving this through self knowledge and introspection recently, but I know I need to be more active and emotionally stable than I am now, so my life doesn't implode in the meantime. This may sound stupid, but I've been considering trying to cultivate a coffee habit (i've never been a coffee drinker) as a temporary means of coping, so that I can finish the projects that i'm involved in, stop missing important career opportunities and generally be more productive and active. I have actually considered many other drugs to help, but after doing the research it seems like caffeine is the best for my situation. The reasons for this are manifold, but i won't get into them here, I don't want this thread to be apologetics for addiction.The question I want to put on the table is this: What are the moral and mental health perils of replacing one dysfunctional behavior (depression) with another (addiction) for practical reasons? Put another way, what do we think of someone avoiding or repressing their true feelings for the sake utility? Sacrificing connection with their honest experience to meet needs lower on Maslow's pryamid? We tell adults with destructive behaviors that it was necessary for them to develop these as children in order to survive in a deranged family and/or society and that there is nothing wrong or bad about them for doing so, but what if someone is not a child, and consciously chooses this?