Are We Sober Yet?

My sobriety ended when I was fifteen years old. The first drug I ever took was Lexapro. I was an angry young man growing up, and Lexapro took my anger from me.

My second drug was alcohol, years after Lexapro became part of my daily diet. To this day, I can remember staring at the cold can of Coors Light in disbelief at how good it made me feel. Alcohol and Lexapro were pure energy and euphoria.

I spent the next five years until I turned 21 taking every opportunity to consume alcohol that I could. If my first love wasn’t available, my friends and I spent time snorting Adderall, drinking bottles of Robitussin, huffing whippets, smoking marijuana and cigarettes, and chugging Red Bull.

College afforded us the freedom to expand our drug-taking hobby. I went to a party school because, of course. Two major events in college should have gotten us thinking about sobriety, but didn’t.

First, a friend of ours smoked weed so chronically that she didn’t realize she had cancer until it was way too late. She didn’t recognize any symptoms until she woke up and couldn’t feel her legs one morning. She would die, but never stop smoking weed. My other friend woke up and drank a few beers before going dove hunting. He would crash his truck and never make it back.

Despite our friends dying one slow death and one sudden one, no one ever talked about sobriety.

A few years out of college, my hard-partying friends settled down and started the next phase of life: careers and marriage. Half of them stopped taking drugs. The other half became very functional alcoholics or potheads. I attempted to stop mostly because I accepted a worldview that was not compatible with living your life drunk, and I wanted to “grow up.”

Sobriety went from unimaginable to my primary goal rather quickly.

I didn’t realize that these few short years had dug a hole that would be agonizing to escape.

It’s one thing to have thoughts about wanting to drink alcohol, and I had those, constantly, but it’s another thing for your entire body to scream for it. There were days when it wasn’t just a temptation—I craved it with my whole being. There wasn’t even a moment of debate, just the truth: I was getting drunk that day.

I decided to get help from the professional helpers.

In desperation, I called up my psychiatrist and explained things. He assured me that I “could drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels and take my whole bottle of Lexapro and if I died it was the Jack Daniels alone that did it.” When I explained that I was having severe withdrawals from alcohol and (like many alcoholics) thought that if I could get past the withdrawals, I would never drink again, he wrote me a three-day script for Diazepam. He did at least warn me that if I took Diazepam and started drinking, I would probably die—informed consent.

I picked it up from CVS and started my weekend detox. I did make it to the end of the weekend without drinking, but unfortunately, not through the end of the next week.

After the failed attempt to quit, I asked my psychiatrist again if the Lexapro could be making it harder for me to stop drinking or interact with alcohol. He laughed and assured me that it was impossible.

After more failure, I had an opportunity to do a thirty-day treatment program, so I went, hoping to have more luck with therapy and forced accountability. When I got to the program, they confiscated my Lexapro and stated that they wanted me to be sober.

To these program directors and therapists, being sober was to put nothing in your body except food. I handed over my Lexapro, and they locked it away, and I started another journey towards being sober. I was confused since Lexapro is a “medicine,” not a “drug,” but I was fine with giving it a shot. I watched my fellow addicts hand over their bottles, all of them with a different psychiatrist’s name on them.

About five days later, I awoke in so much pain that I couldn’t get out of my bed. They told me I was being dramatic and that it was just alcohol withdrawals. At that point, I had experienced alcohol withdrawals many times, and this was not it. I realized that I was having withdrawals from Lexapro. The staff assured me that it was not possible. I called my psychiatrist, who assured me that it was not possible. After several arguments, I demanded a single dose of Lexapro. Within 24 hours, I was back to just having normal alcohol withdrawals, and that was nothing compared to the pain of Lexapro withdrawal.

I decided to give the therapy a shot since we had skipped that option and gone straight for “chemical imbalance” fixing pills. Who needs therapy when your problem is your brain?

Therapy was useless. We drank because our parents spanked us. Because they ignored us. Because of trauma, society, diet, mental illness—take your pick. The more we talked, the more I realized I would never understand why I drank, and that it wouldn’t matter if I did. I needed to be sober, not know why I wasn’t.

Luckily for me, one of the main and immediate messages of programming was “get sober or die.” We sat in a circle, and the therapists passed around the memorial programs from all the people who had attended the rehab and died later when they relapsed. We stared at dozens of smiling, dead young people. The therapists solemnly warned us that we would meet the same fate if we didn’t get sober.

Kicking drugs and alcohol is no joke, and marching towards sobriety in a cohort of suffering caused us to bond quickly. It was during this stay that I learned a new type of sober. Some people who were there for heroin kept sneaking off to the gas station and smoking K2 synthetic marijuana. They explained that they were California Sober. If they weren’t doing heroin, as far as they were concerned, they were sober.

Most didn’t make it through the thirty days, including the California Sober individuals, but six of us did. Within a month our friend, Elena, would drink, snort meth, and die in a parking lot. A therapist from our program would attend her funeral and bring back the program to add to their collection.

I think her death helped me stay sober for about eight months before relapsing. I tried being California Sober, but I hated the effects of marijuana.

I went on for several years in a cycle. I would be sober for maybe a month and then drink for five months.

One day, my future wife asked me why I was taking Lexapro. I told her that if I stopped, I would have withdrawals worse than any drug or alcohol. She suggested that maybe my inability to quit drinking had to do with taking the Lexapro. A familiar thought. I told her what my psychiatrist had said, that that wasn’t possible.

She had a distrust of doctors that didn’t exist in my family. She had been injured by medical treatment as a child and spent months recovering and almost had to repeat a year of school. Eventually, it rubbed off on me.

I was a teacher at the time (a good job for alcoholics) and had summer off. I decided to go ahead and plow through the withdrawal symptoms. I notified my psychiatrist, who promptly corrected my terminology to “discontinuation syndrome.” He warned me that all my anxiety and lifelong depression would come flooding back the moment I stopped Lexapro, since it was holding it all at bay all these years. He explained that depression is sadness, unless you’re a teenager, then it might be anger instead. I might experience either, he said, but it was depression—a “disease” with shifting symptoms.

I started decreasing my dose of Lexapro and quickly developed nausea upon waking. I threw up for about two hours every morning. Then the nausea would subside, and I’d be okay for about four hours. Then I would get migraine headaches and lie in bed for the rest of the day. I would eventually fall asleep and wake up to vomit some more. Brain zaps were the least of my worries. And this became my life.

I had to buy a milligram scale to weigh and reduce my dose by ten percent weekly. What I thought would take a summer ended up taking almost a year. After my last dose, just a sliver of a pill, it took another three months until I started to feel normal again. No anger or sadness returned.

I reported all of this to my psychiatrist, who again told me that my experience just wasn’t possible. So, I fired him.

When I finally recovered from the Lexapro withdrawal and felt fine, I decided to quit drinking again.

For the first time in my life, other than after Elena died, I was able to make it months without drinking. My one month of sobriety grew to three months, five months, eight months, and the relapses shrank to three months, two months, or a few weeks at a time.

It was around this time that I learned of harm reduction and “radical reduction” of drinking. Harm reduction told me that I was sober enough. Who was to tell me what sober meant? I mentioned this at an AA meeting one time and almost got run out of the room.

At that same time, I was working in an inpatient hospital that did detox and chemical dependency treatment.

The psychiatrist in charge was all about harm reduction. At first, I thought this was great, until he stated in the treatment team meeting that if he could write a script for Adderall, a Benzo, Naltrexone, or Suboxone, he had created a lifelong patient. He said alcoholics and drug addicts were already diseased for life, and they should be medicated. Sure, taking Suboxone meant someone wasn’t “sober,” but it also meant they weren’t using heroin. You can then also bill insurance for their recovery. Adderall, read meth, didn’t count since it came from him. A benzo was better than a swig from a flask. This experience made me dislike harm reduction, and I left that job.

I got married, and my wife and I had two kids. I was functioning most of the time, but would still relapse briefly at times and drink heavily. During one of those relapses, I left my bedroom, hung over, to get water, and my kids were loud. I snapped and saw the look of horror on their faces at this angry man I suddenly was. I decided I needed to be sober in the traditional sense of the word.

I could try Naltrexone, which would require taking a different drug daily, or I could try psychedelics. I had already tried rehab. The research around psychedelics was glowing. I decided that I would try ketamine treatments and see if that could do the trick.

I signed up and started treatment. After COVID, they could mail it straight to your house. Convenient.

After taking my first dose of ketamine, I never experienced another alcohol craving. I don’t have thoughts that I should drink, and I don’t have the physical urges and cravings that I had before. Not even one in the last three years. And I didn’t have to take it consistently during those three years, and I do not take it now. I’m finished with ketamine.

I never considered myself sober during the times I was using a radically mind-altering drug. I only count the time when all I’ve put in my body is food.

There is a huge movement in recovery towards psychedelics, causing a rift between the “old school” AA program types and the open-minded California sober types who, instead of marijuana, use ketamine, shrooms, and LSD. The same push exists within psychiatry, and I predict they will try to control, prescribe, and profit from these drugs. But how will they create “patients for life” if their patients get sober?

I have a good friend who has been OG sober for nine years, and his wife for a similar amount of time. When I mentioned that I was going to do ketamine treatments, they were horrified. They were for complete abstinence at the time.

But then they saw it work. They saw me not only quit drinking but also quit having cravings. They started to read research and success stories on Reddit. They decided that psychedelics were great for more things than just sobriety. They decided to treat her PTSD and his anxiety with psychedelics. To supplement their sobriety with them.

While we both started with treatment by a nurse practitioner and were given doses of ketamine from a pharmacy, they eventually went to shrooms and Ayahuasca. Their treatment goals seemed vague to me since they had already achieved something I couldn’t: sobriety.

I then witnessed a rapid deterioration of my friend’s life. These “drugs” became “medicines.” Disregard for the law became justified. They joined a legal 501c3 that offered Ayahuasca ceremonies twice a month that lasted all weekend.

The magic cure was found, and they were all in. Like me with ketamine.

One weekend, he went to pick up his wife from a ceremony, and she exclaimed that she had been shown by the medicine that they had a codependent relationship, and divorce was the only option.

I watched his life fall apart as he tried and failed to convince his wife not to make major life-altering decisions the day after taking Ayahuasca. I saw her leave him anyway. He discovered just a couple of months later that she was now in a relationship with the “shaman” who presided over her Ayahuasca ceremonies, despite “ethical rules” about doing so.

We found out that the “shaman” spread rumors that he was abusive, and he helped her process this abuse in a ceremony. Codependency became abuse—definitions changing on a whim.

He continued doing psychedelics throughout his divorce. He refused to hire a lawyer because he trusted his soul mate, who was leaving him. I watched him give her his house, which she accepted. He was trusting, and she was deceptive, and she ended up with much more than he ever meant to give.

He went to war with the “shaman.” Since “shamans” have no meaningful governing authority, it didn’t matter, and nothing came of it. He and several others left and started their own psychedelics recovery group. Unethical people, not “the medicine,” were to blame.

He told me they had celebrated his “sober anniversary.” It had been ten years now since he drank or smoked marijuana. They celebrated by renting a cabin on a lake. Friday night, he and some others took ketamine together. Others smoked marijuana and drank alcohol. He said this didn’t bother him. On Saturday, they all took mushrooms together. On Sunday, they all took LSD.

I couldn’t take the absurdity of his story, and we got into an argument. He explained that sobriety now means being sober from your drug of choice. Sober from the drug that was killing you. They were all sober under this definition. Most importantly they were still alive. Psychedelics are not drugs, he said; they are medicine. I asked about the difference between therapeutic use and recreational use. He said that it’s always therapeutic.

Psychedelics are different than other drugs. They are harder to abuse. They often do have therapeutic effects. They are profoundly helpful when implementing difficult life changes. There is truth to all of this. They are also undeniably powerful, mind-altering drugs with side effects.

I pushed back hard like a grumpy old AA member and eventually got hung up on.

I knew well enough that psychiatry had failed him, like me, but he said certain therapies and psychedelics had taught him so much.

And ketamine helped me tremendously, too. I have no fear of relapsing and do not experience alcohol cravings. Eventually, though, we all pay a price for anything we put in our bodies. Do the risks outweigh the benefits? I started to experience some very unpleasant side effects on my bladder from the ketamine. I didn’t know what was causing it at the time since my nurse practitioner swore there were no side effects. The ones who profit from drugs always downplay any negative effects. It hurts business whether you have a medical degree or are a weekend “shaman.”

I had also decided that ketamine isn’t a vitamin, and I can’t just take it for the rest of my life. When I stopped the ketamine, my bladder went back to normal. Despite the side effects, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it.

I’m just one person, but I hope psychedelics will help others too. They definitely won’t help everyone, and I’m afraid we will see more experiences like my friends. I would say regulation and using psychedelics purely as treatment would help, but I know psychiatry would oversee that. I have little hope for psychiatry to do anything other than make lifelong patients. I work in mental health and know it’s primarily a business with a questionable choice of customers. I’m not sure how motivated the industry is to promote sobriety. Even if it was, I’m not sure it helps achieve it.

And how can we even rate its effectiveness if sobriety isn’t an objectively definable term, but just a spectrum like everything else now? It means different things to different people. When that happens, words become meaningless.

Psychiatry has always been about words, categories, definitions, and profit. It had to convince people it was legitimate from day one. When it fails, are psychedelics the new savior? If so, will anyone be sober?