Drug addiction treatment

Treatment for drug addiction is planned help spread over months, meant to bring a dependent person to lasting abstinence and back to ordinary life: work, home and relationships with the people close to them. It is not about simply stopping the drug, but about changing the situation that led to use in the first place, which is why we work with the whole patient and not only with the addiction.

The most common misunderstanding is confusing treatment with detox. Detox, the cleansing of the body, interrupts the action of the drug and is usually the first step, but it does not change what pushed the patient toward the substance. That is why proper treatment only begins once the body has been cleared. The course of withdrawal itself and the symptoms of the first days are described separately, on the page about drug detox.

We build the plan individually, after a consultation and an assessment of the patient's health, and we run it entirely privately, without a contract with the National Health Fund.

Addiction is not a matter of weak will or of a single decision. It is a disorder in which taking a substance stops being a choice and becomes a compulsion: tolerance grows, so the dose needed keeps rising, physical symptoms appear after stopping, and working and family life gradually arranges itself around the substance. The moment at which a patient loses control is almost never recognised as it happens. It is usually the family who recognises it, and usually later than it could.

The Polish picture of the problem differs from the one we know from North American reports. There is no fentanyl epidemic here; the dominant opioid problem is the misuse of prescription medicines, and alongside it stimulants and cannabis products. In 2022 Poland recorded 337 drug-related deaths, around 8.9 per million inhabitants, one of the lower rates in the European Union. Low mortality does not mean a small scale of addiction, however, because most of the harm is spread over time and does not end in death.

The practical consequence of this picture is that treatment begins by establishing which substance and which pattern of use we are dealing with. Dependence on prescription medicines calls for different management than dependence on stimulants, and that in turn differs from a situation in which the substance is masking an untreated mental illness.

The first step is a medical consultation, not a decision about the form of therapy. At this stage nobody commits the patient to a programme, a length of treatment or abstinence; we establish what is happening, for how long, which substances are involved and whether physical health needs stabilising first. No referral is needed, because we work outside the National Health Fund.

The call can be made by the addicted person or by a family member. The difference matters only when booking: we can carry out an adult patient's appointment only if they consent to it themselves, so the family can prepare the ground but cannot arrange treatment on someone else's behalf. In the case of a person under 18, a parent or legal guardian makes the arrangement.

The first appointment goes faster if the patient has to hand a list of substances and medicines taken along with doses, information about earlier attempts at treatment and how they went, and about chronic illnesses and psychiatric care. If it is unclear how to name the problem, it can help to complete the DUDIT test before the conversation.

We turn nobody away for coming too early or at the wrong moment. A consultation held while the patient is still undecided is a better starting point than putting it off until a crisis.

Treatment cannot honestly be reduced to a single number of weeks, because what decides it is not the substance but what the patient has around them. The plan runs through four stages. The first is contact and diagnosis, counted in days. The second is stabilisation, including detox where it is needed, counted in days or weeks. The third is psychotherapy itself and it takes the most time. The fourth is maintaining the change, which formally has no end, although its intensity falls.

What prolongs this process is predictable, and it is better to know about it in advance than to treat it as a personal failure. A co-occurring mental illness means that treating the addiction alone usually does not hold. A lack of support at home means the patient returns after every session to a conflict that is itself a trigger. Going back to the same environment and the same people sets therapy up an uphill road, even when it is conducted well.

For the same reason we do not promise a cure understood as a point after which the problem disappears. The realistic goal is a lasting change in how a person functions, together with the ability to react early when the risk of returning to use appears.

Pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy answer two different needs and neither replaces the other. Medicines lower tension, improve sleep and make it possible to get through the period in which the patient is physically unable to work on themselves. Psychotherapy deals with what medication does not touch: the situations in which craving appears, the beliefs that sustain use, and the decisions made a few hours before reaching for a drug.

In practice this means learning to recognise triggers and respond to them before they turn into compulsion, rebuilding relationships and a daily routine that is not organised around the substance, and working on what the patient does in the first hour after the thought of using returns. The forms of work, the course of sessions and the differences between individual and group therapy are covered on a separate page: addiction therapy. Once the patient is stable, some sessions can be held online over video, so that travelling does not become a reason to drop out; the first appointment and the work during the hardest weeks happen in person.

Therapy begins only once physical health allows it. A conversation held during withdrawal symptoms rarely changes anything, because the patient does not retain what was said.

Relapse is part of the course of addiction, not proof that treatment was ineffective or that the patient failed. Planning for it in advance works better than pretending it will not occur: a patient who knows what to do on the first day comes back to treatment after a few days instead of a few months.

The rule is simple and worth agreeing before therapy ends. Contact happens early, not once use has returned to its earlier intensity. Treatment does not start from scratch, because everything the patient learned earlier still applies. What does change is the plan, because a relapse shows where the previous plan did not hold.

After therapy ends, a few things keep the change in place: less frequent but regular follow-up appointments and an agreed way of responding to high-risk situations. What helps most, though, is someone close who notices before the patient does that something is starting to come back.

No. This is the most common misunderstanding families call about, and it comes from a comparison with alcohol. With alcohol there is an administrative and judicial route: a municipal commission for solving alcohol-related problems or a prosecutor submits an application to the district court, and the court may order an adult to undergo addiction treatment. With drugs no such route exists.

The Act on Counteracting Drug Addiction provides for treatment without consent only in the case of a person under 18. It is ordered by the family court at the request of a legal representative or another authorised person, and the treatment may last up to two years. In the case of an adult, the act gives the family no instrument of compulsion whatsoever.

The only route in which an adult's treatment can form part of a court decision is the criminal one. Where proceedings concern an offence carrying a penalty of up to five years and the perpetrator is an addicted person, the prosecutor may suspend them for the duration of treatment. This is a side effect of a criminal case, not a path a family can set in motion. Legal incapacitation and admission to a psychiatric hospital without consent have their own, very high thresholds and are not an answer to addiction as such.

None of this means the family is helpless, only that its tools are of a different kind. What works is withdrawing from funding and from shielding people from consequences, setting specific conditions for living together and holding to them consistently, having the conversation while the person is sober, and therapy for the family itself, which most often already functions within a pattern of codependency. A consultation without the addicted person present is possible and is often the first sensible step.

Both routes genuinely exist and there is no point presenting one as the worse option. Addiction treatment under the National Health Fund is free of charge and needs no referral to an addiction treatment clinic; it also covers residential and round-the-clock centres, which we do not run. The price is waiting time and less freedom in choosing an appointment and a therapist, and with residential treatment often distance from home as well.

Private treatment is paid for out of pocket and that is its only real drawback. In return the patient gets an appointment counted in days, continuity of care with the same person, and the option to start when they are ready rather than several weeks later. With addiction this matters more than with many other health problems, because readiness to be treated rarely lasts long.

We add discretion to that, but not anonymity, because medical records are created in exactly the same way on both routes. Combining the routes is often sensible: starting privately so as not to lose the moment of decision, and registering in parallel with a facility funded by the National Health Fund if residential treatment is needed.

We hold consultations in twenty-one cities across Poland, and an appointment can be booked by phone on 880 808 880 or through the booking form. Addresses, hours and the range of services in a given city are on that clinic's page, because not every one of them provides the full scope of treatment.

If you do not know where to start, a phone call is enough. We will establish whether the first step in your situation is a medical consultation, drug detox, or a conversation for the family alone. Where the problem concerns prescription medicines, the right place is the page on prescription drug addiction treatment, and if what you need is psychotherapy itself, go to the addiction therapy section.

The cost of a consultation and of individual services is given in our price list, before the appointment and without having to ask about it over the phone.