The ultimate goal of all drug rehab and alcohol rehab is to enable the patient to achieve lasting abstinence, but the immediate goals are to reduce drug abuse, improve the patient’s ability to function, and minimize the medical and social complications of drug abuse. Alcohol and drug rehabilitation is done at various levels of intensity. There are several types of alcohol and drug abuse treatment programs. Short-term methods last less than 6 months and include luxury residential therapy, medication therapy, and drug-free outpatient therapy. Longer term treatment may include, for example, methadone maintenance outpatient treatment for opiate addicts and residential therapeutic community treatment. Outpatient drug-free treatment does not include medications and encompasses a wide variety of programs for patients who visit a clinic at regular intervals. Most of the drug and alcohol treatment programs involve individual or group counseling. Patients entering these drug and alcohol treatment programs are abusers of drugs other than opiates or are opiate abusers for whom maintenance therapy is not recommended, such as those who have stable, well-integrated lives and only brief histories of drug dependence. Short-term residential drug and alcohol treatment programs, often referred to as chemical dependency units, are often based on the “Minnesota Model” of treatment for alcoholism and drug abuse treatment. These programs involve a 3- to 6-week inpatient drug and alcohol treatment phase followed by extended outpatient therapy or participation in 12-step self-help groups, such as Narcotics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous. Chemical dependency programs for drug abuse arose in the private sector in the mid-1980s with insured alcohol/cocaine abusers as their primary patients.

You can’t rush addiction treatment. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, as they say, and the plain fact of the matter is that drug recovery doesn’t happen overnight. On the contrary, rehabilitation has to be an extended process, for the simple reason that addiction is a stubborn disease. What that means, in the most practical sense, is that successful addiction treatments are always long-term addiction treatments. Your addiction treatment experience really can help you get where you need to go, provided you find a rehab center that can give you the care you need at every step along the way. In the end, nothing could ever be more important than that.

There are plenty of drug rehabs in Los Angeles, all of them offering guaranteed “addiction treatment” solutions. Don’t believe everything you hear. In choosing a rehabilitation facility, it’s vital that you find a place that’s right for you. So please, do your research. Learn what you need to learn. You will never, ever make a more important decision.

Drug addiction treatment isn’t a passive activity, or a spectator sport. Too many California drug rehabs would have you believe that drug treatment doctors can do the heavy lifting for in a drug rehab facility. That’s not the way it works. The only successful drug treatment programs are those driven by the efforts of individual rehab patients. No one can get better for you in a rehabilitation center. In the end, the success or failure of your drug addiction treatment experience is up to you. Yes, the care you get from a luxury rehab facility will be vital in helping you get where you need to go. But you ultimately have to make the journey on your own two feet.

Remember, drug addiction treatments can’t help those patients who don’t seek them out. Rehab really does change lives…but only for those addicts who can muster the courage and wisdom to make the right choice. Drug addiction treatment done right will help you rediscover the world as you used to know it, and yourself as you used to be. In the end, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could ever need any more persuading than that.