How Tuvan Throat Singing Saved Me From a Life of Heroin Addiction
Back in the late 90s, I went through my last withdrawal from narcotics. I had been a heroin addict for five years, and after many failed attempts at getting clean, I signed up at a methadone clinic.
Methadone normalized my life. I no longer needed heroin to function, but I did need to get my juice daily at the clinic. Without it, I’d be back where I had started, a down-and-out junky. I was able to get a job, save up some money, and after a few months of living with my grandparents, finally had a small apartment that I could call home.
After six months in the program, I told my counselor that I wanted to detox. I had been on 85mg for a while, and I wanted to step down slowly until I could walk away and live a normal life. No longer did I want to be tied to a substance to get me through the day.
We worked out a plan and over the next few months, my dose was lowered every couple of days. Eventually, I was down to a mere 5mg every morning. He had told me that if I left the program with a daily maintenance at this dosage I might feel a little rundown for a day, but there’d be no actual withdrawals like from heroin. He suggested that I continue to be weaned off slowly. The plan was to get it lowered to 2.5mg a day and stay at that incredibly low dose for a few weeks before finally graduating to the real world.
