I Quit Drinking, But What About Other Substances?
I Quit Drinking, But What About Other Substances?
Where I draw the line for my sobriety.
When I got sober, I knew that I wanted to remain completely alcohol-free, but I wasn’t sure where to draw the line on other substances. When it comes to being sober, which substances are OK and which aren’t?
I’ve met a lot of people who act like the solution to this is straightforward, and yet I’ve also heard a wide variety of answers, many of which strike me as perfectly reasonable.
Pseudo-Sobriety
Many years ago, one of my close friends from college got hooked on heroin. Fortunately, he caught the problem early on, went to rehab, and got clean before the drug destroyed his life.
For about a decade after that, he followed a traditional sobriety model. In addition to avoiding heroin, he also abstained from drinking, smoking pot, and other drugs.
However, as he entered his thirties, he began to question whether he really needed to stay sober. As he told me, he thought that maybe he was just a dumb kid who abused a very strong drug. He had no interest in trying heroin again, but he thought that now that he was older, he could go back to drinking alcohol and smoking pot. After all, he had never had a problem with those substances.
I was already sober at that point, and I thought that it was a stupid idea. It struck me as an insane risk for no real benefit. However, my friend disagreed. After a decade sober, he decided to start drinking again.
If this was an after-school special, we already know the way this story would go. He would start with alcohol, then graduate back to heroin, and eventually end up dead.
But that’s not what happened. It’s been another five years or so since his decision, and his life is going better than ever.
He drinks in moderation, smokes pot occasionally, and still hasn’t touched heroin.
I’m not sharing this story because I think he’s a good example to follow. I still believe that he put too much at risk. In my opinion, he got very lucky not to end up going back to heroin.
My point, however, is that there are multiple ways to overcome addiction. Sometimes, the recovery world is so dogmatic that it dismisses success stories that don’t follow the standard model of sobriety.
I have to admit that with my friend, even though everything seems to be going great for him, I still sometimes wonder if his decision is going to lead him back to a destructive path. But, I’m trying to be accepting of the idea that his needs and my needs are not the same.
For me, I need to avoid other drugs in order to stay alcohol-free. From what I can see, that might not be the case with him and his heroin problem.
This discussion reminds me of a hot topic that I keep seeing in the news: the “California sober” trend. The idea is that people quit drinking and using hard drugs, but continue to indulge in softer drugs like pot and shrooms.
I’ll admit that it sounds a little silly to me, but I’ll also admit that I’ve met some people for whom it seems to work well.
When I first quit drinking, I actually did try smoking pot a couple of times. I thought that maybe it would provide a moderate middle ground between my alcoholism and total sobriety.
The trouble was that I was using pot in exactly the same way that I had used alcohol—to numb my feelings and forget my problems. I was just trying to replace one substance with another, instead of addressing any of the real issues in my life.
If I had kept smoking pot, I would have never grown as a person. As a result, I can’t imagine I would have lasted long without going back to alcohol.
It felt very obvious to me that the only way for me to remain alcohol-free was by abstaining from all other recreational drug use too.
Where Exactly to Draw the Line?
I’d guess that most people reading this newsletter have come out on the same side of things as me. Although there seem to be some people who can quit one recreational drug and keep using others, I think that for the vast majority of us, we need to quit them all.
Sure, there are exceptions like my friend, but nearly everyone else that I’ve met who has overcome a substance addiction has done it by getting sober. Even for that friend, it took him a decade of traditional sobriety to kick his habit in the first place.
With all of that said, there are still a couple of psychoactive substances that I think aren’t as clear-cut as alcohol, pot, and heroin.
For example, many of the recovering alcoholics that I’ve met over the years have been cigarette smokers. Nicotine is a highly addictive psychoactive substance, yet it seems to get a pass in the sobriety community.
I was a smoker for my first three years sober, and I often struggled with whether the cigarette use was harmful to my sobriety or not. Ultimately, I don’t think that it put me at risk for going back to alcohol, but I also didn’t feel like it fit with the healthy lifestyle that I was trying to build for myself. It’s now been nearly five years since I quit smoking, and I certainly hope to never go back.
Another example is caffeine, which is also psychoactive but not so addictive. In my experience, recovering alcoholics (myself included) tend to go through way more coffee than the average person. I’ve already had a couple of cups this morning, and I plan to have another couple this afternoon.
For a while, it bothered me that I was drinking so much caffeine. I even ended up giving it up for an entire year.
In the end, however, I decided that caffeine really didn’t have any effect one way or another on my sobriety. Unlike with cigarettes, I went back to drinking coffee and haven’t regretted my return at all.
Finally, there’s the question of medication. For some people, anything a doctor prescribes is OK, regardless of the medication’s nature. However, I’ve found myself mostly avoiding medication since getting sober, unless it seems absolutely needed.
I don’t mean to ramble, so I’ll cut off the examples there. My overarching point is that there are many, many substances that can seem borderline when it comes to sobriety. Even if most of us agree that we want to be “completely sober,” we might not always agree on where exactly that line is drawn.
I’ve met some people who would not count a cigarette smoker as sober. It’s a position that I see as extreme and wrong, but it’s a position they hold nonetheless. There are others who count even someone who occasionally smokes pot as sober, albeit the “California” variety. Again, I don’t agree with that definition, yet it’s one that is gaining ground.
Although some people act like there is no question over what counts as sober and what doesn’t, the reality is that there are many others who continue to debate it.
After years sober, my main takeaways from these debates are the following:
Before taking any substance, even cigarettes or caffeine, we should think seriously about whether it puts our recovery at risk.
When in doubt, we should err on the side of caution.