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Like yourself, i'm an addict too. Dissociatives, mxe, pcp and ketamine.

I became entirely obsessed and devoted, obsessed with combination with DMT. Seeking something, I never even really know what it was at the time, but I grasping for it desperately, I felt as if I could get so close, yet always be so far, like grasping at smoke, the more you grasp the further away it became. I was grasping at the infinite, at god. Eventually suffering this after long I didn't even want it anymore, but i'd always end up back there some how. I couldn't even understand why I was doing it anymore, it almost totally unconscious.

Running around around and around chasing the illusion that there something 'there' that will make things better. This illusion that there something outside of Here and Now that can offer you something that you need. Like a donkey with a carrot suspended in front of him from his own harness.

This illusion was so drilled into me, that I not even begin to consider it, until i had failed over and over and over, trying to live by my own devices, trying to get something 'out' of life. Not only in my substance use, but all aspects of my life. Substance use was only the cataclysmic manifestation of it all, the obvious pointer to the flawed delusion. It wasn't until i reached a point of such complete despair, such complete defeat, I had to surrender everything i thought i knew about the world, the universe, about psychedelics, about myself. I had to throw it all out. All of it. Throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I became open enough to become teachable, to learn how to live in the Here and Now. To unlearn everything I thought I knew. Sobriety, what I define it as, is not to simply be without substances, but to be content in the Here and Now. To be present in this moment. As it is. With no desire to change it. In addiction, I had months of 'sobriety' without substances, but I never had single day of THAT. I could not bear to sit with Myself for a minute, I needed some way out, some distraction, whether it was constant loops of thought or chess games or vigorous physical activity.

When I first began to live in the Now, it was so liberating, it actually felt like being on LSD all the time, in that sense of connection to all of reality and to myself. It was all there! ALL of it. Infinite. Eternal. God. Now. The Now has no beginning and it has no end. There was absolutely nothing I needed any longer. Everything I could ever possibly need was right there, now, and eternal.

We try very hard to think up ways to keep ourselves from that. Like thought itself.

How are your nerves? Any burning or numbness in the feet, hands, or anywhere else?

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New Sobriety was an exciting and terrifying time for me. I drank and drugged for 30 years til it all came unraveled and I ended up hurting enough to want to be sober more than I wanted to be drunk and high. When I quit it was as if a warm wet blanket had been removed from my brain, leaving it crackling like a downed power line. At the end of a month I thought "So this is what sober feels like"? At 6 months I looked back and thought "Wow! At 30 days sober I was CRAAAZY. So this is what sober feels like"? Realistically it took my brain somewhere between one and two years to rewire itself into something resembling equilibrium.

Like you said, it took stone cold sobriety to give me some perspective, and it was 10 more years before I made a decision to take up psychedelics. Glad you were able to get sober when you needed it, and I hope you are able to get the perspective you need to make a sound decision on any future drug use. Sober is good dope too.

Years ago, I read about scientists who studied the role of "anadamide" a neurotransmitter, which the molecule of THC includes a portion that replicates the shape of. So THC works in the brain, to unlock the anadamide gates at the synapses. What the scientists said, is that anybody who used a lot of THC, grows more anadamide gates, and then after giving up consumption of THC, the body can begin to produce more anadamide to make use of those gates.

I read the study, and immediately thought this is what happened in my life, after only six months of every day cannabis age 30. And sustained to this day, with only rare use of cannabis or any other psychedelic. Eventually cannabis became quite psychedelic enough in fact.

I am certain that a similar phenomenon can occur by use of almost any psycho-active substance. But also, that if the psychoactive is a plant, our bodies may have inherited some DNA key to how to use the new gates in normal life; whereas if the psychoactive is an extract, the pattern of assembly combinations at synapses of all the various "gates" which the psycho-actives may have unlocked, is as yet unevolved.

Obviously this is a complex question in science, because the neurological pathway of each psycho-active, is discrete, (eg not every neurotransmitter works like anadamide, as a mechanical key opening a mechanical gate in the membrane wall of neurones at the synapse) and yet each will be replicating of a naturally occurring process, otherwise they would not and could not be psychoactive.

I think there is a very good reason why addicts of strong narcotics such as opium derivatives, often find it easier to arrive at abstinence, after also using a psychedelic, and that is to do with the pattern of combinations of neurotransmitters needed to replicate the addicted state of mind. And there are also very bad combinations. For example, LSD is well known to be quite useful for alcoholics who can't stop drinking without hallucinating. But I know two men who used LSD before, and early on within, developing a heroin habit, and both have found that the LSD lead into a worse addiction, via having prevented adequate insight into the addiction. One of those two men, in fact got fed LSD unwillingly, age 16, by the drug suppliers who had entrapped him into running their drugs for them on the streets in Sydney's red light district, Kings Cross. They did it knowing they could impose a worse drug habit upon him, via LSD. So we need be very very careful about how the knowledge is made accessible.