Before you detox

Detoxing involves the physical, psychological and social processes of:

• clearing the opiates you have been taking out of your system;
• your body adjusting to being opiate free;
• your mind and feelings adjusting to being opiate free; and
• you, and the people around you, getting used to you being off opiates.

It is easy to get completely involved in the issue of what you are going to take during the detox in order to make the withdrawals less severe. But it is important to remember that the detox is unlikely to be successful if you don’t spend some time thinking and talking about how you will cope without opiates and who you will see and what you will do once you are off.

This first section of the handbook is the longest because planning can make all the difference to the success of a detox.

It outlines the things you can do, and the help that might be available, to help you make the changes you want to make to your drug use.

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