Alcoholics Anonymous and the like

[Ksa]

Talking about it to people that understand may be helpful. Just the support. I held a group for substance abuse with my teen clients and I could see how they felt just by all the "me too!" going on. Very nice.

The concept of Substance Abuse is flawed. Substances trigger affects you experience in your everyday life, whether it is serotonergic, dopaminergic or adrenergic, the effects are in no way strange to us except for psychedelics. For example, methamphetamine triggers a dopaminergic response, which feels similar to the excitement someone experiences before imminent sex, upon an achievement or simply while doing a rewarding activity. The body is programmed to receive such stimulus and it's very hard to damage it by triggering such natural stimulus.

If you define abuse as something destructive, that lowers the amount of dopamine receptors for example, then eating ice-cream, having sex or playing a video-game is destructive in that sense too because it's known to lower dopamine receptors through the same mechanism as methamphetamine. When you bombard a receptor with dopamine, it wears off, plain, common sense.

If you argue that abuse is an excessive consumption of a substance, then, whoever consumes less than 40mg of Methamphetamine daily doesn't abuse it, according to the FDA, 40mg of Dexedrine or Desoxyn is the daily limit for the treatment of ADHD and narcolepsy. This amount can be taken daily without adverse effects for a lifetime.

But then you argue that it's still abuse, and that abuse is simply taking a controlled substance that was not prescribed to you by a doctor. Ahhhh! But then we get into politics right? We are no longer into the realm of medicine, health and science. We are no longer talking about what's good for the individual, we're talking about what's good for the government! So then you don't abuse the substance, you abuse the law!