Drug abuse treatment is necessary to successfully overcome drug addiction; without drug abuse treatment, an individual may never abandon drug use.  Remember that drug abuse treatment isn’t something that just happens to you, or something that will progress of its own accord; drug abuse treatment, in the end, is only and entirely what drug abuse patients will it to be: hopefully for the better, sometimes for the worse.  Drug abuse treatment is a tool or program that can help fix relationships, repair things that have been broken, and, above all else, save lives.  Drug abuse treatment is most effective when it is designed to treat the individual rather than the disease.  On its most fundamental level, drug abuse treatment is about freedom: from the physical and psychological bonds of drug addiction, from the overwhelming need that characterizes drug abuse.

Treatment medications offer help in suppressing the withdrawal syndrome and drug craving and in blocking the drug’s effects.  Treatment programs may include detoxification, inpatient or residential treatment, outpatient treatment, and aftercare or continuing care programs.  Treatment is highly structured and can at times be confrontational, with activities designed to help patients examine damaging beliefs, self-concepts, and patterns of behaviour and to adopt new, more harmonious and constructive ways to interact with others.

Drug abuse treatment is, to say the least, a trying process, however drug abuse treatment is more than worth it, really, so worth it that that it’s hard to imagine how anything else could ever be more important.  What that means, of course, is that drug abuse treatment is about more than just the well-being of individual drug addicts: When a drug addict gets healed in a drug abuse treatment centre, his entire community wins.  There’s no gentler way to put it, no prettier way to say it: If you’re a victim of drug dependency, drug abuse treatment is the only chance you’ve got.