Addictions, Substance Abuse and Withdrawals

Substance Use Disorders Pertaining to: Alcohol, Smoking, Benzodiazepines, Opioids, Cocaine, and Stimulants

Sep 07, 2023

This article is by no means meant to be comprehensive but rather is a general discussion of how certain substances, such as the over-the-counter amino acid agmatine, can be useful for people dealing with addictions, substance use disorders, and withdrawals from various substances such as alcohol, and opioids. Addictions are a very terrible thing people deal with directly and indirectly, and as many know first hand can ruin the lives of the addicted, and their families. As always, none of what is discussed here constitutes medical advice.

Doctors can be quite helpful when they work with addicted persons and prescribe more beneficial and less harmful prescription drugs for addictions and withdrawals, such as clonidine, naltrexone, amantadine and memantine. However, many doctors may not even realize that there has been research on these medications and various OTC substances that help people get over their addictions and deal with withdrawals, such as agmatine, magnesium, NAC, vitamin D, progesterone and pregnenolone, to name a few.

Some overall general theories of addiction:

One general theory that attempts to explain part of what drives addictions to certain substances is the idea that people are attempting to “self-medicate”, albeit in a sub-optimal way.

When it comes to things like alcohol part of the addiction could be from the desire to self-medicate. For all its issues, alcohol does have effects that can make it perceived as being something that is immediately useful (for lack of a better word) for those suffering. Part of this is due to its ability to increase a GABA-like neurosteroid in the brain. So, in general, doing things to increase GABA and GABA-like substances such as progesterone or allopregnanolone can help prevent the need or desire for alcohol. Even supplementing things like taurine and theanine should help replace alcohol, due to their GABA-promoting effects. Supplementing progesterone and/or pregnenolone would be a very useful alcohol replacement.

“For example, a man who had been unhappy with his work and had struggled with "alcoholism" for 13 years, he gave me the impression of someone lacking the basic hormone precursor, pregnenolone. A few minutes after he took 100mg of pregnenolone, his depression and anxiety disappeared. Later, he said “That's the feeling I've been trying to get from alcohol, but it never worked”. Pregnenolone, more powerfully than alcohol, lowers cortisol while stabilizing other systems. Its highest concentration in the body occurs in the brain, and its level declines sharply with aging. It very likely makes a large contribution to the adaptiveness and sense of well-being which are characteristic of healthy young individuals. In healthy young people or animals, additional pregnenolone has no detectable effect.”
-Ray Peat, Ph.D.

Smoking and using nicotine products is also another way to “self-medicate” in my opinion. Nicotine has been shown to be useful for many neurological and psychiatric conditions such as OCD, ADHD, schizophrenia, tics and Tourette’s syndrome to name a few. It seems to also help in general with things like focus. This is all to say, that it is plausible that people are using nicotine products to self-medicate, maybe even without knowing it. Nicotine itself can be a problem but a big issue with using nicotine products is actually the method. For example, smoking cigarettes is very harmful for many reasons, such as the fact that they are high in cadmium, they contain many added chemicals and the process of smoking itself is harmful to the body. On top of all that, tobacco leaves are heavily sprayed with pesticides and can be moldy.

This doesn’t mean the “non-smoking” ways of using nicotine are healthy. Vaping is very determinantal to people’s health and is wrongly perceived to be “safe” by many. Nicotine use should thus be replaced with other things if its use is driven by a perceived need because of some underlying issue that nicotine may be temporarily helping with.

I’ve personally witnessed that some people who appear to experience “nervous tics” such as peculiar eye movements or abnormal blinking utilize nicotine products heavily. I posit that this nicotine use may be a subconscious attempt to remedy the nervous tics. Nicotine (as nicotine patches, and nicotine gum) has been studied as a useful tool for chronic tic disorders, I discuss this in my article on Tics and TS. This does not mean that smoking, vaping and other harmful ways of using nicotine are good ideas, but I simply bring this up as a potential explanation for an increased risk of substance abuse for certain people.

Addiction appears to also be generally related to high stress hormones. This is in line with the theory of “self-medication” if people are using substances (alcohol, smoking etc.) as a response to the elevated stress hormones, to alleviate the stress temporarily. Part of this is supported by the fact that drugs that lower stress hormones, such as clonidine, seem to be generally useful in treating addictions. As in, Clonidine can help to decrease the urge to use the addictive substance via lowering certain stress hormones. In other words, some consider addiction to be a “manifestation of chronic stress”. I discuss elevated stress hormones in my hypertension article and my anxiety article.

“The (in)famous Rat Park experiment performed in Canada several decades ago provided indisputable proof that organisms will do just about anything to remediate stress and “addiction” is one such (suboptimal) remedy that the organism uses for only as long as the stress is present. Take away the stress and the “addiction” disappears.”
-Georgi Dinkov (Haidut)

The idea is, that people may be subconsciously utilizing different substances like alcohol as a response to their stressful lives as there is a perceived anti-stress effect. The logic that follows is that if the stress in one’s life is reduced, the “need” to indulge in the harmful habit is reduced.

To illustrate this idea further, I’d like to bring up a quote from one of my favourite novels. In George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” the protagonist Winston recently started seeing a woman and as a result, his perceived outlook on life improved greatly, thus leading him to drink less.

“Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it.”

Another general theory of addictions is that low overall "baseline” dopamine can lead to addictions partly because every increase in dopamine (from say use of an addictive substance) is felt more, because of the low baseline. The low baseline of dopamine may be making people seek out substances that increase dopamine transiently. Low baseline dopamine can be a result of many things, such as high levels of things that lower or oppose dopamine, such as prolactin and even serotonin. Further to this, someone could be converting dopamine into other catecholamines too quickly, and may not be consuming enough of the nutrients needed for dopamine production such as vitamin B6, phenylalanine and tyrosine.

I also consider addiction to be at least partially related to an imbalance of glutamate and GABA. I really want to emphasize the broad anti-addictive effect of the amino acid Agmatine, it seems to be one of the best OTC substances for getting over substance abuse. You can find out more about glutamate and GABA here, in that article I also discuss agmatine briefly. Glutamate and GABA imbalances seem to be common when going through withdrawals from certain substances, like benzodiazepines. NMDA antagonist seems to be very beneficial for preventing withdrawal symptoms.

Plus, if people can avoid the use of the addictive substance to start off with then there would be no risk of addiction. This is especially relevant with benzodiazepines “Benzos” such as Valium and Xanax. Instead of opting for a benzo for anxiety or sleep, other things should be tried. Some ideas are discussed in the linked article mentioned in the above paragraph, and this article on anxiety. Things like progesterone, agmatine, taurine, theanine, vitamin B6, magnesium, lithium and vitamin D can all be very useful for anxiety and depression. However, if someone really feels they need medication for their anxiety, they should talk to their doctor about creative ways to avoid the use of the highly addictive “Benzo” class of drugs. For example, clonidine is an anti-hypertensive medication, but can also be used for many other purposes, such as anxiety and panic attacks, and may be a far better option than benzos in the long run. As you will see shortly, clonidine is also a very useful medication for getting over certain addictions.

I will also be releasing an article on insomnia sometime in September, which will hopefully help people avoid taking (addictive) sleeping pills. Similarly, there are many things people can do to avoid taking stimulants regularly, I discuss this topic more in this article on ADHD.

We should strive to avoid becoming a society of people taking “soma” at every inconvenience, as in the novel by Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”. Avoiding ever taking these substances from the beginning is the best way to avoid having to give them up and experience addiction and withdrawals. However, if someone does find that they are in a situation where they are addicted to something, there are things that seem to be able to help them get over the addiction, especially where sheer willpower is simply not enough.

A (non-exhaustive) list of compounds for getting over substance abuse & addictions:

Agmatine (a most impressive OTC amino acid that has broad anti-addictive effects)
Progesterone
1. *Progesterone dissolved in vitamin E (some products at end of article)
Pregnenolone
DHEA (good to stay at low doses (5-15mg), best in combination with pregnenolone)
Taurine, Glycine, Theanine
Vitamin D
Magnesium
NAC
Lithium Orotate
Vitamin C
Niacinamide
Medications/Drugs
1. Nicotine patch non-prescription, useful for getting over smoking habit.
2. Clonidine Prescription drug used on-label for hypertension but used off-label for many disorders including addiction and withdrawals.
  1. Agmatine seems to act similarly to clonidine in some respects and has also been called “clonidine displacing substance” before.
  2. Agmatine+clonidine seems to be a helpful combination for nicotine addiction.
3. Naltrexone Prescription drug that can be helpful for getting over opioids and alcohol.
4. Memantine and Amantadine NMDA blocking prescription medications, among other things, and can help with reducing addiction and withdrawal severity

The following are a few substances that people can be addicted to, with some suggestions of things that can help to reduce the urge to use the addictive substance, replace the addictive substance, or help get over the withdrawals. Obviously, the prescription drugs mentioned (clonidine, amantadine, memantine, naltrexone) would need to be prescribed by a physician.

Having said that, many OTC substances can act like the medications mentioned. For example, amantadine and memantine work in part by being NMDA antagonists, but magnesium, agmatine and zinc are all natural NMDA antagonists. Naltrexone works in part by blocking TLR4, and many natural OTC substances can block TLR4 “toll-like receptor 4” such as Progesterone, Pregnenolone, Vitamin D, Riboflavin and Glycine.

Stimulants:

Progesterone
Pregnenolone
Lithium Orotate
Agmatine
- Agmatine attenuates methamphetamine-induced conditioned place preference in rats
  1. “Together, these data suggests that agmatine attenuates the rewarding effects of methamphetamine and may be able to modulate the abuse liability of methamphetamine.”
Magnesium
- Magnesium in drug abuse and addiction
Vitamin B6
Amantadine (can be used as a replacement for amphetamines etc.)
Clonidine can be used for ADHD in place of amphetamines

Some readers may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned “caffeine”. This is because I consider coffee and tea to be very beneficial for the body, especially for the brain and the liver. With the caveat that they are used responsibly and that people respond well to caffeine. To me, this means not having caffeinated beverages on an empty stomach, as this will amplify the stress response. I don’t see getting over a so-called “coffee addiction” to be a worthwhile endeavour. If someone feels they “need” coffee to function, then there may be an issue stemming from the inability to produce enough energy, they may be hypothyroid, anemic etc. But that doesn’t mean they need to stop having coffee or tea, instead, they need to get to the root of their energy problem. Coffee can be (and for many people should be) part of a healthy lifestyle. It is a great tool to protect against many issues such as dementia, liver diseases, gout, asthma and so on. Keep in mind, that coffee and tea have many beneficial compounds other than caffeine, such as chlorogenic acid and theanine.

Coffee withdrawal symptoms are likely due to a surge of nitric oxide, prostaglandins, and other inflammatory mediators that the coffee was helping to suppress.

Danny Roddy

Ray Peat wrote a great article on caffeine. When I try to access it from his original website the layout is messed up for some reason, luckily it was also uploaded on this other website: Caffeine a vitamin-like nutrient.

Many of the things mentioned in this article will likely be helpful for people who feel they are dependent on cannabis, particularly pregnenolone. Furthermore, many things discussed here are probably relevant for those dealing with a gambling addiction, and in fact, the medication amantadine is shown to be helpful for this particular addiction.

Amantadine in the Treatment of Pathological Gambling: A Case Report

Some relevant Haidut.me blog posts:

*None of this is medical advice. I am not a medical professional, always talk to your doctor*

If you enjoyed this article, please consider checking out the other articles I’ve written. Also, please feel free to subscribe (it is free to do so) and share the articles with others. Thank you!

BTW: I am a frequent guest on the podcast “Stuff Your Doctor Should Know”.

Discount code DEAN works at:

Ona’s Naturals (progesterone oil, topical progesterone and pregnenolone creams)
LifeBlud (Magnesium products, Taurine, Theanine, B vitamins, Methylene Blue)
Health Natura (oral pregnenolone, Methylene Blue)
Saturee (skin care products, desiccated liver, aged Cascara Sagrada)

Maladies & Remedies

Discussion about this post

Maladies & Remedies

Addictions, Substance Abuse and Withdrawals

Substance Use Disorders Pertaining to: Alcohol, Smoking, Benzodiazepines, Opioids, Cocaine, and Stimulants

Some overall general theories of addiction:

A (non-exhaustive) list of compounds for getting over substance abuse & addictions:

Alcohol:

Smoking:

Benzodiazepines:

Cocaine:

Opioids: (Morphine, Heroin, OxyContin, Vicodin, Fentanyl etc.)

Stimulants:

Some relevant Haidut.me blog posts:

Discussion about this post