christhefish
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2015
- Messages
- 8
Hi everyone. I hope this is welcome here. I've been a recreational codeine user for a number of years, on and off, and I wanted to share my experience because I haven't seen many posts or articles which reflect my personal experience, and there may be some people out there who will benefit from hearing my experience.
I won't go in to a great deal about how it started. As with many opiate addictions, it started as a legitimate painkiller prescription following a head injury, and when the pain was no longer a problem, I kept taking it and increasing it because it felt good. My source was a mixture of online prescriptions (which thankfully seem to be more difficult to obtain now) and filtering from OTC Co-codamol and Nurofen Plus. I "topped out" at approxiately 700mg, two or sometimes three times a day. Because I "topped out" and never increased the dose past that point, after a while it had almost no effect on me, other than maybe chilling me out a tiny bit. Sometimes I'd miss a morning, or an evening but I never missed a full day, so I never experienced withdrawal or cravings, and this is where the problem came. I began to be very afraid of the withdrawal I had never experienced. I've scoured the internet for someone in a similar position, but all I could find was people saying they were coming off a "normal" prescription dose of ~200mg a day, and it wasn't bad.
I'm a happily married man with a wonderfully supportive wife (who never uses any drugs), but whilst she did know I used it occasionally, she didn't know I was hooked on it and using every day. So I began to fear that if I came off it, she would see the withdrawl and know that I'd been using a lot more and lying about it.
Long story short, one Friday I decided to do it. Cold turkey. I figured I can go through hell for a few days and then be normal again; that is what most of the stuff I'd read online suggested would be the worst case. Perhaps my biggest mistake was that on that Friday, I decided it was a clever idea to ease the suffering with a bottle of vodka, so I got hopelessly drunk by lunchtime. This is my first tip - don't drink during withdrawal. It doesn't help, and actually makes the experience worse. On the Saturday, it also made it harder to tell what was going on, because I wasn't certain how much of my symptoms were caused by withdrawal and how much by the huge hangover.
I spent the whole day on my sofa, suffering diarrhoea, vomiting every hour or so, and being unable to sleep. It was very unpleasant, but not horrific - it wasn't like Trainspotting; no hallucinations, no soaking wet bedsheets, just bad nausea (probably exacerbated by the hangover). Later in the day/evening I started to get "restless leg syndrome" but in my whole body, not just my legs. For a few hours, I had to keep moving almost constantly. I barely slept that night - I tended to fall asleep, then wake up after half an hour and lie there for another hour or so, repeating through the night.
The next day, I felt about 20% better, but still rough. At that point I decided cold turkey was just putting me through unnecessary suffering, and that I'd be better tapering (which I should have done from the start), so I bought myself a pack of Nurofen, and took 8x12.8mg codeine (along with an unnecessary 1600mg of ibuprofen, which did me no harm but is generally a terrible idea). The withdrawal went away almost entirely. It came back about 6-8 hours later, so I took another strip of 8 tablets, and that was enough for the day.
I then spent a couple of days on this dose, feeling absolutely normal again. After just a couple of days I was able to go cold turkey again with no withdrawal symptoms at all, except for a bit of diarrhoea which is to be expected.
So that's my advice to anyone in my position. Cold turkey is unpleasant, but not unbearable, so if you want to go down that route, it's very feasible, and should only last a couple of days. You could probably quit on a Friday and go back to work on Monday if you don't mind feeling a bit rough and carrying mild diarrhoea for a while. But tapering is VERY easy - you can likely go down 70-80% on day one and suffer minimal withdrawal. A lot of the advice I've read online treats it like heroin, and suggests reducing by 10% per week, but in my experience you can do codeine A LOT faster than that. Of course, all of this is only based on my personal experience - I don't know anyone else who has been through this, or even used codeine beyond its intended dose/purpose, so please don't take any of the above as gospel.
I hope that this is useful to someone, somewhere. If not, then I just wasted 20 minutes of my life, and I can get over that!
I won't go in to a great deal about how it started. As with many opiate addictions, it started as a legitimate painkiller prescription following a head injury, and when the pain was no longer a problem, I kept taking it and increasing it because it felt good. My source was a mixture of online prescriptions (which thankfully seem to be more difficult to obtain now) and filtering from OTC Co-codamol and Nurofen Plus. I "topped out" at approxiately 700mg, two or sometimes three times a day. Because I "topped out" and never increased the dose past that point, after a while it had almost no effect on me, other than maybe chilling me out a tiny bit. Sometimes I'd miss a morning, or an evening but I never missed a full day, so I never experienced withdrawal or cravings, and this is where the problem came. I began to be very afraid of the withdrawal I had never experienced. I've scoured the internet for someone in a similar position, but all I could find was people saying they were coming off a "normal" prescription dose of ~200mg a day, and it wasn't bad.
I'm a happily married man with a wonderfully supportive wife (who never uses any drugs), but whilst she did know I used it occasionally, she didn't know I was hooked on it and using every day. So I began to fear that if I came off it, she would see the withdrawl and know that I'd been using a lot more and lying about it.
Long story short, one Friday I decided to do it. Cold turkey. I figured I can go through hell for a few days and then be normal again; that is what most of the stuff I'd read online suggested would be the worst case. Perhaps my biggest mistake was that on that Friday, I decided it was a clever idea to ease the suffering with a bottle of vodka, so I got hopelessly drunk by lunchtime. This is my first tip - don't drink during withdrawal. It doesn't help, and actually makes the experience worse. On the Saturday, it also made it harder to tell what was going on, because I wasn't certain how much of my symptoms were caused by withdrawal and how much by the huge hangover.
I spent the whole day on my sofa, suffering diarrhoea, vomiting every hour or so, and being unable to sleep. It was very unpleasant, but not horrific - it wasn't like Trainspotting; no hallucinations, no soaking wet bedsheets, just bad nausea (probably exacerbated by the hangover). Later in the day/evening I started to get "restless leg syndrome" but in my whole body, not just my legs. For a few hours, I had to keep moving almost constantly. I barely slept that night - I tended to fall asleep, then wake up after half an hour and lie there for another hour or so, repeating through the night.
The next day, I felt about 20% better, but still rough. At that point I decided cold turkey was just putting me through unnecessary suffering, and that I'd be better tapering (which I should have done from the start), so I bought myself a pack of Nurofen, and took 8x12.8mg codeine (along with an unnecessary 1600mg of ibuprofen, which did me no harm but is generally a terrible idea). The withdrawal went away almost entirely. It came back about 6-8 hours later, so I took another strip of 8 tablets, and that was enough for the day.
I then spent a couple of days on this dose, feeling absolutely normal again. After just a couple of days I was able to go cold turkey again with no withdrawal symptoms at all, except for a bit of diarrhoea which is to be expected.
So that's my advice to anyone in my position. Cold turkey is unpleasant, but not unbearable, so if you want to go down that route, it's very feasible, and should only last a couple of days. You could probably quit on a Friday and go back to work on Monday if you don't mind feeling a bit rough and carrying mild diarrhoea for a while. But tapering is VERY easy - you can likely go down 70-80% on day one and suffer minimal withdrawal. A lot of the advice I've read online treats it like heroin, and suggests reducing by 10% per week, but in my experience you can do codeine A LOT faster than that. Of course, all of this is only based on my personal experience - I don't know anyone else who has been through this, or even used codeine beyond its intended dose/purpose, so please don't take any of the above as gospel.
I hope that this is useful to someone, somewhere. If not, then I just wasted 20 minutes of my life, and I can get over that!
