So what is addiction then?

Everyone wants to move away from uncomfortable feelings and to get the “highs” in life. It is not an illness, it is a natural normal human drive and in itself, is not a problem. But with addicts this drive becomes exaggerated and misdirected.

Here’s how it works… We discover that by taking cocaine or any other mind altering substance, that we can change our state of mind and change how we feel inside. It makes us feel better, feel good, it gets us high and it takes us away from the space we are in. We like it and after all who wouldn't, so as you would expect, we do it again and again and for a while it works and over time we come to rely on it to make us feel better.

Eventually though, the things that made us feel so good start to cause problems. There are the come downs, problems at work, the expense, the damaged relationships, the broken promises, the withdrawal, health problems, depression and paranoia. Need I go on?

But the only way we know how to deal with it all is to use more, or to move on to another addictive behaviour. All our attempts to feel better end up making us feel worse, which in turn makes us do more. It’s a crazy cycle which seems impossible to escape. The harder we try the deeper we get.

And even if you can leave the cocaine alone for a bit and fight that urge to get high, ultimately you have to live with what is going on in your head and also deal with the awful emptiness of not using. Can you really face the prospect of never getting high again? It’s a powerful drive.

So what is wrong with traditional treatment?

Treatment centres are expensive and rarely work. Most of them are geared towards alcohol and opiates and doctors are a little lost with cocaine. There isn’t a drug they can prescribe as a substitute and using chemicals to manage feelings is a seriously bad idea long term anyway, after all that’s what got us in the mess in the first place. And how many of us can afford the luxury of leaving home and going missing from work for six weeks in rehab?

Nearly all treatment centres follow a 12 step approach, they require you admit to having an incurable disease that you must always fight day in day out. You need to submit to a higher power and attend meetings for the rest of your life. This doesn’t sit comfortably with most people and usually results in a never ending round of relapse. Don’t get me wrong, some 12 step counsellors’ are highly skilled and healing individuals and the meetings can be a great support. I’m not knocking the good work they do, but lets be honest CA meetings are full of people who relapse week in week out, it is not a solution for many people.

Your local community drugs team isn’t an appealing option either, I used to work for one and that was bad enough, but the experience for clients can be really grim. You’ll find yourself queuing up for drug tests with your little cup of urine along with street addicts desperate for their next dose of methadone.

And when you get to the front of the line the odds of recovery aren’t good either. Last year the National Treatment Agency spent an additional £131m of tax payers’ money and only helped 70 extra people get clean – that’s a cost of £1.85m each!

You could always try counselling and analyse all of your issues but that tends to bring up the very feelings that we use to escape. You could end up with a very good understanding of your neuroses, but a raging habit to go with it. You don’t need a clever understanding of your problem, you need a solution.

So what’s the solution?

Well it’s obvious really. You are using cocaine to deal with feelings and to experience highs and this drive is natural and normal. The solution therefore is to learn a better way to do this, a better way to do what you have been trying to do. You need to learn a way to change your state of mind, to deal effectively with your painful feelings and find a way to get high, to get a real buzz from life – without chemical assistance.