How much does cross tolerance make a difference?

[skittlezzzz]

I take Temazepam for insomnia each night. At least 30mg would be just fine but less than a week after that I need at last 75mg to get me to sleep.

With that said, I took 6mg of Xanax since I ran out of Temazepam but it is not making me tired at all...which it usually knocks me out with obly 2mg.

Could my Temazepam tolerance be do high that I'm not feeling the Xanax? I was always weak when it came to Xanax and even 2 mg would help me out but I'm in opiate withdrawal right now and nothing is helping. I'm fairly healthy and not every weight. Exercise and in my mid 20s...if that makes any difference. It seems no matter how the benzo dosage is, it still only masks the opioid withdrawal for about 2-3 hours max.

Any insight plz.

 

[morphine-dreams]

Absolutely. Benzo cross-tolerance is very real and pretty damn consistent IME, though some are more cross-tolerant than others. Pretty much all gabaergic drugs will have some degree of cross-tolerance, much like opioids.

20mg temazepam is supposed to be equipotent to 0.5mg alprazolam, so mathematically, you should be good with about 2mg of Xanax, but everybody is different and 2mg Xanax wouldn't get me to sleep either. The opioid WD is definitely making things worse too. Benzos help with WD insomnia, but they only go so far because in the end, it's the opioids that you're WDing from. Also, iirc, temazepam is pretty hypnotic. If you like/are used to those effects, you won't get them nearly as much with Xanax, which is more of a straight anxiolytic benzo. For sleep, I personally benefit a lot more from hypnotic effects, so maybe that's part of what's going on too.

 

[Keif' Richards]

^Totally agree. I'm sure there are examples of incomplete cross-tolerance and vice versa when discussing different Benzodiazepines, but I've never heard it discussed at the same length to which Opioid cross-tolerance has been discussed. I've always just assumed that cross-tolerance is more or less comlete between Benzodiazepines and have never been disappointed by this assumption. In that same vein, Benzodiazepines tend to produce different effects from one to the other at equipotent doses.

My best friend can handle Clonazepam (Klonopin) and Alprazolam (Xanax) no problem and at relatively high doses as well. He can keep his shit well together on 2mg or maybe even 3mg of either of these respectively. However, one time before he went to go grab his first tattoo, we grabbed some Lorazepam (Ativan) to help allay the anxiety a little bit and I ended up needing to practically babysit him and was afraid the guy would refuse to do his tat. Bear in mind, the dosage of Lorazepam was 2mg.