text: vicodin addiction: what about vicodin causes addiction? i know alot of people says it offers a calming sinsation and relaxes them and they take it w/o being in chronic pain.... for someone who thinks they might be addicted but have it available to them... who can they wing themselves off of it? is there any natural or non-narcotic drugs that could offer the same sensation to help a person loose the dependancy of the vicodin?  any help (serious help) would be appreciated. hydrocodone is a morphine molecule with a methyl group and a hydrogen atom attached to it. essentialy it is morphine that has to be demethylized by the liver before it attaches to opiod receptor at base of brain. the body normaly produces it's own morphine, called endomorphins. when a person is taking morphine (of any form) it precludes the need for the body to produce it's own morphine, or endomorphine, so the internal system that produces endomorphines shuts down over time. when this person stops taking morphine, they experiance all the terrible things that morphine, or endomorphine is supposed to regulate - like body temperature, intestinal motion, pain perception, dysphoria...etc, and the only way to "fix" it is to wait until the endomorphine system starts up again (several months to get back to good condition) or to take more morphine. there are treatments, called medicaly assisted therapies, wherein a patient is prescribed either methadone or suboxone to mediate the withdrawel symptoms. suboxone is the newest. it is butyl morphine and nalaxone in a pill that one dissolves under the tungue. butyl morphine is a partial agonist with a high affinity for receptors, so it doesn't switch on the recptors as hard as a regular opiod would, but it sticks to the receptors better than a regular opiod would. the nalaxone is a receptor blocker and only becomes bioavailable if the user crushes and injects the pill - in that case the nalaxone would clean the receptors of any and all opiods and the user would experiance full withdrawel symptoms. the net being that the user who takes suboxone doesn't really get high and if they do try to abuse other opiods they will not get any affect from them. there is also a "ceiling affect" with butyl morphine - so if you try to take a lot of it at once to get high, you don't get any additional affect after a certain amount. the addict would take suboxone for 6 months to a year and then taper off by reducing the dose by a half a milligram a week until down to nothing.