Due to cashflow problems, no mo' H till I get paid (2 days away, meaning about 80 hours with no strong opiates total). I haven't done a planned 'taper' as such but considering I last smoked a small bag of half-decent dope on Saturday at 6pm, and it's now Monday at 12:45pm, and I feel pretty good (physically fine, mentally cheerful) I thought I'd post up here how I managed what I thought was gonna be a horrible weekend. (I've been doing a bag a day at least, sometimes 2 or 3 on weekend days, for about 9 months, doing H in general for a year; weaker opiates daily before that. Not a huge habit, and lately the dope has SUCKED, but it's still a habit). Saturday 6pm - smallll bag (prob less than .1) of alright dope, smoked in one go Saturday 9pm - 17.5 grams Indo Kratom in tea (didn't manage to drink allll of it but nearly). This actually made me feel off baseline for an hour or so. Saturday 10pm - .5mg xanax, usually wouldn't scratch me. Had a nice sleep fairly instantly, still feeling fine, until... Sunday 7am - I've woken up way too early which is a bad sign. Stomach rumbling, starting to feel that general I-don't-want-to-get-out-of-bed-today even though I'm wide awake feeling. A bit achey. Nothing serious, but it doesn't bode well. So: Sunday 8am - 60mg Dihydrocodeine + 50 mg codeine on a stomach with a small breakfast in. I become fairly cheerful and looking forward to my lazy Sunday. Drink a bottle of brandy (the small ones with about 5 doubles in). Lunch goes down fine. I'm a bit emotionally sensitive all day - being moved by stuff I normally wouldn't be - but this may be slight drunkenness. Sunday 2pm - 75mg codeine. This seemed to put a stop to some slight aches that were coming up, but this may be imaginary. Feel fine after an hour anyway. (This is where things get more horrible, hard to keep track of, and interesting): Sunday 8pm - 75mg codeine + .5mg xanax. Felt fine in bed watching a film (Mean Girls, arf!) BUT... Sunday 10:30pm - can't sleep. Am exhausted but have the muscle spasms. Often I get these with no other symptoms so I think they're partly in my head. Only partly, because I'm flailing about and twitching and unable to get comfortable, and you can't make that up. But the complete lack of sweating or stomach upset suggests I'm getting off lightly. Mentally I'm only agitated by the fact that I can't sleep and have work the next day, but suffering no distress just of itself. So... (Throughout Sunday night, from 11 till prob around 2): 1 small line of ketamine 1mg more xanax 80mg codeine (spread out into 3 or so doses) The k did affect me (haven't done it in ages and just wanted to see if it'd calm my muscles, I've never used it for this purpose before) because I went to get a drink a couple times and was staggering about like a motherfucker. 3am Sunday/Monday - got to sleep around here I think. 7:30am Monday - wake up. Not withdrawing wake-up, where suddenly you're horribly awake but tired, but wake-up due to alarm clock. I coulda easily gone back to sleep. Stomach rumbling a bit. Soo, two bananas and... 7:45am Monday - ...60mg dihydrocodeine + 40mg codeine. It's now nearly 1pm, I've eaten, I'm mildly tired and have the slight mental warmth/fog that goes with it, but I don't feel bad. Will take some more codeine in an hour or so. Why am I telling you this? I've been interested as to how useful the lowest, easily available opiates (DHC is prescribed to smackheads fairly commonly over here so there's a fair bit on the street; codeine is available OTC in lower doses) actually are in staving off WDs from a mild-ish dope habit for a few days. The codeine has ibuprofen in which I'm sure isn't nice, but better than paracetamol (acetaminophen or whatever the fuck you guys call it!) I physically can't keep extracted codeine liquid down, the taste just makes me puke. I know personally that DHC doesn't affect me much more than codeine does, even though it's still probably better for WDs. I guess this is promising, and shows that regular use of even quite low levels of weak opiates can have you feeling ok. Don't get me wrong, I'm craving dope, but otherwise, my mental state is fine and I'm content to carry on with work. 9 months of 10-12 bags of dope a week (the rock is another story!) to 60-odd mg of codeine every 4 hours,in 42 hours, not bad. Don't get me wrong, last night was horrible, but it wasn't -too- horrible. Anyone who's been through a real cluck would be able to handle that no problem. Plus there's the added kinda thing, where if you take a load of benzos at night, even if you don't sleep well, it's all a hazy dream the next day. We'll see if the same happens tonight. Then tomorrow afternoon I can go purrr-chase some H. Comments/queries welcomed.
Highest codeine OTC preparations are 12.8 mgs per tablet, with either paracetamol (acetaminophen), so you gotta CWE, or better, 12.8 with ibuprofen - still not nice but it doesn't ruin your liver. I don't actually know if CWE works for ibuprofen, I don't bother, just take em. These are available in almost all pharmacies, not some of the smaller ones (they sell the preparations with like 8mgs), and a box of 24 will set ya back about 5 quid (so like 8 bucks?) So that's 307.2 mgs of codeine. Not bad, I think it's underappreciated over here! Obviously stronger 30mg tablets are available prescription only. Tramadol is prescription only but docs seem to be crazy about prescribing that atm, it's everywhere (not that it matters, bleurgh). A couple of years ago I found *one* british paramedics/hospital supplies website selling kaolin + morphine antidiarrhea mixture. I think I musta bought their whole stock cause they've stopped (maybe they came to their senses). That wasn't great, it was a mixture of kaolin which is very chalky, and about 17 mgs of morphine in a bottle. If you let the bottle sit for days, the morphine would float to the top, and there'd be a layer of clear morphine liquid you could draw off with a syringe. You couldn't bake the liquid off to smoke/snort, so you could only drink it - but for opiate naive people wanting to do something a little stonger, a couple of bottles making a 30+ mg morphine dose was nice! I only found one website selling that, now the mixture is kaolin only, though I'm told some really old school pharmacies may still have some knockin about. Proper oldschool remedy...
