Coming Off

Harm reduction is about using without wrecking yourself. This shelf is about stopping, which I never got around to writing down.

That is a bad thing to forget. Stopping is where a lot of the damage happens, and with a few of these it is the dangerous half.

What goes here: tapers that are calculated rather than guessed, what withdrawal does and what actually helps, how long it takes, what to use instead, and the part nobody warns you about, which is who you are once the drug is gone.

I have come off everything I have been on, so most of this is lived rather than read. That cuts both ways. I know what worked and what was a waste of time, and I am a sample of one. Where I have not tried a method or a replacement myself, I will say so rather than guess.

So there will be anecdotes here, and no apology for them. A paper tells you the half-life is twenty hours. It does not tell you that day four is the one that breaks people, or which of the things you were promised would help is useless at three in the morning. That part only comes from someone who has been through it.

Alternative medicine gets a hearing too. A fair one, meaning I will say when something works, when it is a placebo you can afford, and when it is a placebo that will hurt you.