Okay, so I heard about this first from The Junky’s Wife but I had to talk about it here because, well, I heart Amy Winehouse and let’s just say that there’s a lot about her life—as far as the media describes her—that I can identify with. And this latest little bit, just makes me shake my head.

As if it isn’t hard enough to be an addict, even harder to also be in love with an addict, how sad is it when the addict you’re in love with is an idiot as well. It seems that Blake Fielder-Civil, Amy Winehouse’s husband is locked up at Pentonville prison in London. If you don’t know, it’s kind of hard to maintain a habit while you’re inside—hard but not impossible. Making money, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult. Fielder-Civil has overcome this issue of lack of income by selling his wife—or signed pictures of her, anyway. Yup, the word on the grapevine is that he’s trading signed copies of her picture for heroin, pictures that the recipients are hoping to hock on eBay, I guess. Hey, if you can’t be with the one you love, exploit the one you’re with.

Addicts are nothing if not resourceful, I guess. However, the Melbourne Herald-Sun reports that the couple isn’t handling the split so well: he’s mad that she isn’t making it to visits, on time or at all, in some cases. Conflicting accounts say that he may ban her from visits due to her cocaine use. Somehow, I don’t see a junky passing judgment on using behavior, but you never know. Supposedly, he’s told her “not to bother” visiting again.

And Winehouse, well, she’s strung out. According to Melbourne’s Herald Sun a source at Britain’s The Sun says that “Amy’s in an awful state again - she’s clearly on drugs. Many of us think full-time residential rehab is the only option but she won’t go back.

“She was smoking cannabis and drinking heavily as soon as she left rehab. That has now increased. Everyone who has seen her in the last week or so has been really disturbed by the state she’s in. She’s getting back to her worst.”

Ironically, or maybe not so ironically, one of Winehouse’s biggest singles off her Back to Black album is a song called “Rehab,” in which she states emphatically that “They’re trying to make me go to rehab/ I said, ‘No, no, no.’” Winehouse has reportedly been to rehab a few times but stayed only briefly before returning to her old lifestyle.

Who knows what’s true and what isn’t. Many watch the progression of Amy Winehouse’s disease as avidly as they follow the Grammy winner’s career. She’s 24 years old with an amazing voice and an incredible musical sensibility, with a number of YouTube.com videos attesting to her addiction issues. If anything, it’s yet another example of how all the success, beauty, fame and money can’t solve a thing if you suffer from addiction.

One of the youngest on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab is Jaimee Foxworth. She was a star at the age of 5 and soon became a singer before landing a role on the series ‘Family Matters’ as Judy Winslow. Now, at the age of 28, she’s one of the quietest characters on the show. No drama, straight shooting. In my opinion, she may be more likely to succeed than some of the others. By not getting involved in the dramatic happenings around the house but still making friends and building a community of support, hopefully her focus is on her recovery, which is where it should be.

When you are undergoing an outpatient treatment using Suboxone, you don’t necessarily have the benefit of someone there with you, day in and day out, to keep your focus on your recovery. You do, however, have many distractions in the way of work, family and friends. There’s always something else to do, but if your problem with addictive painkillers extends beyond a simple physical addiction and touches on mental and emotional addiction issues, then you may need to attend NA support groups or even reach out online to any one of the number of forums created for those trying to stay clean. Having someone to check in with will help you keep the focus on you as slowly decrease your Suboxone dosage and head toward a life without drugs.
 

The word “trigger” is a common one heard in drug rehab and support group settings and refers to just about anything that makes you want to get loaded, get drunk or get high. It could be something negative like dealing with family members who stress you out or something positive like a New Year’s Eve celebration where everyone else is under the influence. New research on brain imaging, however, says that triggers to use can start in addicts even before an obvious stressful trigger event happens.

Controlling the desire to use, or the mental addiction to drugs, starts long before you end up in a situation that causes you to falter. Something that everybody knew intuitively has now been proven scientifically with brain imaging technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Images that are associated with drugs—say, a syringe, a sign for a bar, a pill bottle—even when seen for as few as 33 milliseconds can evoke the desire to use subconsciously.

Dr. Nora Volkow is the director at the National Institute for Drug Addiction (NIDA). She says, “This is the first evidence that cues outside one’s awareness can trigger rapid activation of the circuits driving drug-seeking behavior. Patients often can’t pinpoint when or why they start craving drugs. Understanding how the brain initiates that overwhelming desire for drugs is essential to treating addiction.”

This is an especially important point to absorb when you are undergoing Suboxone detox and treatment at home. You won’t have the benefit of isolation provided by inpatient treatment or the built-in benefits of support groups unless you choose to find it on your own in the community. You may not have even realized that you were mentally addicted to the prescription painkillers you’ve been taking until the haze they provide starts to lift. If you find yourself having cravings that you’ve never had before, call the Meditox center any time of the day or night for support and ask for assistance finding local resources that will help you remain drug-free.