A surgeon gave an opiate-dependent patient opiates after surgery without telling her. She felt no withdrawal or cravings because she didn't know she'd taken them. The speaker argues addiction may be driven more by what you believe about a drug than the drug itself.
And I wanna point out an ex-opiate user story in Alfred Lindsmith's book, Opiate Addiction. That story is very interesting because there was an ex-opiate user that claimed that she was heavily addicted to opiates. Opiates are known as painkiller drugs that a lot of people get hooked on and sometimes overdosed on. And she said to the doctor that after the surgery, if she's in pain, please don't give me opiates because I don't want to get withdrawals again and go back into my opiate addiction because I used to be really, really addicted and it ruined my life essentially. Now I'm just paraphrasing what she said. So they did the surgery, but towards the end of the surgery, she actually was in a lot of pain. So the doctor did something since opiates are known to be effective painkillers and most people that consume opiates recreatively use them in like pills versions or powder versions. And so the doctor simply took a liquid form of opiates. So she couldn't know that it was opiates and gave it to her and she consumed it, completely relieved the pain. She felt good, not in pain anymore. And she thanked the doctor saying, thank you for not using opiates as I requested. I didn't want to fall back into the addiction, but she didn't know that she actually just consumed opiates, but simply from the fact that she didn't know, simply because of that, she never experienced withdrawals. She didn't feel sudden urges and temptations to go back to taking opiates. And she was completely clean, which shows that you need to be careful with the information you feed yourself, because a lot of quitting and recovery is a placebo problem that we really need to be careful of.
