Alright so I didn't realize people were still replying, but I suppose I'll post an update. I'm an occasional smoker, and so far I haven't directly noticed any effect on my clonazepam use, but we're talking like one or two cigs a day here (unless I'm out drinking of course, which is like playing Russian Roulette on a benzo, so I don't do that much anymore).
This whole thing is just frustrating me. Do benzos have a cross-tolerance with any other popular drugs? I was on a methadone binge just before being prescribed the kpins so I have a super-high opiate tolerance currently.
As I said in my OP, I was previously on 0.5mg AS NEEDED and I barely even touched the things. Now I'm taking 1mg kpin (along with 30mg paxil) at 8am and 1mg kpin around 8pm to last through the night and such. I think a lot of people are on this 1mg BID kpin scheme, so idk why it's causing me so much trouble. I haven't been taking benzos or kpins at all lately, and they used to kick my ass when I'd buy the green guys from my friend.
Around the first couple of times I used klonopin recreationally, I googled to find an appropriate dose and I think a thread on this site (could have been another site, but bluelight is pretty key for this stuff so I'm pretty sure it was) and it said a good recreational dose for someone with no tolerance would be 1-3mg.
Since I'm having so much trouble and I'm rollin on 30mg of addy at 2:30am, I'm just going to go off on a huge tangent of my benzo experiences, to the best chronology that I can.
NOTE: If you really don't care, you can stop reading here and just simply advise based on my previous comments, the following is just extra info that I believe to be pertinent to the mystery of the seeming impotency of my klonopins at current.
The first time I experienced a kpin "buzz" or mentally-altering event from it was on a random night when I was feeling anxious and had no other drugs (this was during a summer drug binge where every night was usually coke or good pills). I was in my room on the computer and proceeded to sublingually take 8 of the yellow Teva 0.5mg tablets one after another. They tasted good and I didn't feel fucked up, so I guess that's why I kept going. Four milligrams was much higher than any other previous kpin dose I'd had, so I figured it would be sufficient, not to mention taking any more than 8 pills out of my bottle of only 30 in just one night could throw up a red flag (my mother knew of my drug tendencies so frequently counted the pills when I wasn't around, pretty dumb, but we all deal with it so whatever).
It was probably about 9-10pm when I was done dissolving all of them (and no, these weren't the orally disentegrating ones, yet they dissolve great regardless, anyone else find this to be a strange mystery?) and I felt really no difference. Klonopins are tiny-ass pills so for me they always depend on how much food is in my stomach. I always prefer to take pills on empty anyway, but since this was a SL experience, it didn't matter. I continue to use the computer, as I enjoyed as a hobby at the time as a summer evening activity to relax, and eventually gravitated from the desk to my laptop laying on my bed. I was in a great mood, not really tired though. I've heard if you fight the drowsiness from kpin, you'll get more of a buzz, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.
Onward, I quickly discovered time passed very quickly as I transitioned from slightly drowsy to fully-energized, I'd compare it to an adderall feeling. So 3am passed, then 4am, then finally around 5am I decided to go to sleep and call it a night.
-----
The next day, I realized that I had forgotten a
lot of events from the day before, even events that happened before I took the dose, presumably anterograde amnesia.
The point is, the 4mg fucked me up big time. Then, another time probably about 6 weeks ago, my friend gave me a (rare treat) 2mg klonopin pill and we each took one, not under the influence of anything else. I suffered some pretty hardcore memory loss from that night and I was rather loopy that evening. It surprised me because it was only 2mg, but I wasn't complaining since it was a great value to get from just a single pill!
Now, literally months since having even the 0.5mg script, and no benzo tolerance, I'm dosing 2mg per day and experience no loopiness, and most importantly,
not a satisfying amount of anxiety relief. This part is truly upsetting. Since becoming a college freshmen, my anxiety has gone up, inevitably, but the amount of physical and mental discomfort I'm experiencing from this chronic anxiety is uncharacteristic for me, I feel at least. Even taking the first 1mg on an empty stomach, there's no buzz, just makes me even more tired, which almost always leads to a nap once I get back from my first class Mon-Thurs. For the first four or five days after being prescribed the 1mg BID, the anxiety was KILLED, as I mentioned in one of my previous posts. I was so relieved. No more bowling ball in the stomach, no more jumpy intestines, chest tightness, etc.
Howeeeeeverrrr. (Of course there has to be a however. Or I wouldn't have wasted all this damn time typing, and I'm sure you're getting tired of reading by now. This is turning out to be more blog-post-esque than a forum reply, but whatever)
I haven't changed any of my drugs/meds/diet since then and specifically the last 72 hours have been different than usual. On the 7th or 8th day of using my 1mg BID, my anxiety crept up on me at like 5pm! This alarmed me because I know how long of a half-life it has and my doctor assured me this dose is plenty sufficient. So instead of waiting until 8pm-ish to take my second pill, I SL'd it right then at about 5pm.
Then, yesterday the same thing happened except the anxiety started at around 1:30PM, totally ridiculous since I'd just eaten 1mg just 5 hours prior. Instead of freaking out and taking another pill, I called my doctor's office and spoke to his nurse (i.e. the nice lady that handles all the whiny patients' phone calls and relays the important info to the doc; the medium.) about the whole situation and what I'd experienced over past few days concerning the klonopin to appear to be shorter and shorter lasting. I did unfortunately happen to mention that I had taken 3mg on some of the days to compensate. Finally, I got a call back from her 5 minutes before their office closed, and she read to me the doctor's email response to the issue:
He says instead of taking the BID dose 12 hours apart, break the first in half and take 0.5mg at 8am, then 0.5mg at 12-1pm (lunch), and of course the final 1mg at 8pm as usual. Also, he explicitly said
under no circumstances should I ever take more than the 2mg in a single day, so that was a big oops on my part.
I was honestly hoping they'd change me to ativan or something else (not looking for xanax or valium, then I'd just wanna get high all the time), but without seeing the doc, it was pretty obvious there was little more they could do for me, and I won't be in to see him for just under 3 more weeks-- so not terribly long but it seems like an eternity while I'm stuck here trying to balance this all out and figure out how/why my prescribed meds are or aren't working.
I appreciate their advice, but I'm not sure how taking two doses of 0.5mg 5 hours apart is going to be any more beneficial than just taking the stronger 1mg right out of the gate. For me at least, I have this sense of there being "thresholds" for drugs and my body. Like for example, if I do H or acid, the dose I do might be just barely below my threshold of effectiveness, so I might get a buzz but nothing exciting. But, when the threshold has been crossed, the full intended effects of the drug/med are experienced for the duration of my experience. So in this case, I just don't feel the 0.5mg is going to break my threshold to relieve any anxiety at all, considering when I had the 0.5mg pills before, they didn't do shit. Maybe there are certain people who just have certain natural immunities/tolerances to benzodiazepines. It's really starting to become a realistic theory because my friends this past summer would always talk up xanax real big-- so one night I popped 2mg and just felt super sleepy, nothing recreational at all. As for other benzos, I've taken a 10mg valium once and felt absolutely nothing, but I didn't really expect to though. I took 45mg of temazepam a couple months ago during the early evening and succumbed to a long nap before I could really notice anything interesting. Everyone always talks about taking their benzos in such extremely low doses, yet I'm at a starting dose of 2mg/day and it doesn't affect my daily activities whatsoever, and I'm still feeling anxiety physically to an uncomfortable degree.
In fact, I decided to skip my first 1mg dose this morning to save for a relaxing double-dosed evening tonight. I had an empty stomach and took the pills about 30 minutes apart, the second pill was taken at 6pm. I then went to a wedding rehearsal and by 7:15-8:00, I was extremely tired. I came home and crashed into an immediate 2-3 hour nap, pretty much on accident. I woke up and walked around the house a bit, went for a short drive, then decided to go back to sleep since I was still tired and had a long, full day of classes and events. But...I couldn't go to sleep because the anxiety was-a-rumblin' in my stomach, sort of like it did before I started taking the klon. I knew I didn't have a chance of sleeping, and I stupidly threw away my old bottle of trazodone, so that's pretty much why I've been typing this off and on for the past few hours. --More importantly.... wtf! I had just taken two of these bad boys roughly 5-6 hours prior and they haven't totally knocked out my anxiety? A lot of my anxiety is social, but I've been diagnosed as GAD as well. Nothing major is on my mind currently, nothing bothering me, just shitty rumbly tummy anxiety. And it's not that I'm hungry either...trust me, I ate a huge dinner at about 8pm, so rule that possibility out. This is the shit I'm talking about guys, I know a ton of you are taking the same medication daily as I am and it seems to be working wonders for you, yet I'm struggling. I don't mean to sound rude or annoying, really, and I apologize if I've offended anyone with how unnecessarily long this post has become. I'm just on here sincerely to share my experiences and seek advice
Also, the main reason I skipped my morning klon dose is because I had a special Friday today. My friend who also takes anti-deps and such (no benzos however) loaned me one of his 50mg vyvanse capsules. I super-underestimated this mf'er. I wiki'd the shit out of it last night and learned that it's basically just a non-abusable (shorter lasting?) version of adderall. It's not abusable because it has to be activated in your GI area or something, so injecting or snorting the powder from the capsule supposedly does absolutely nothing. I've had very few addy experiences, so I didn't really prepare myself for how awesome of a day I was about to have. I took it at about 9:20am on an empty stomach, of course, went down to the cafeteria and ate breakfast, then headed off to my 10am class. This class is only once a week, so its 1:50 long and has two "parts." The first part of class, 300+ of us sit in an auditorium and listen to speakers, then the second half of the class period is spent in groups of about 30 or so. I sat through the auditorium lecture intently and honestly didn't notice the come-on of the vyvanse since I was sitting still and had just woken up not long ago, I wasn't extremely alert...yet.
Once we were dismissed to go to our smaller group rooms, I stood up and immediately realized I felt a pleasant difference
I'll make this long story short, the vyvanse stuck with me through all of my classes all day and gave me amazing confidence, energy, enthusiasm, participation, and all the other things that you guys get from adderall and amphetamines. Even at 50mg, I didn't feel edgy at all, felt none of my usual anxiety, and had no desire to take a klonopin throughout the entire day, at all. Pretty strange, eh? When I saw my doc last week, he offered me 3 options for my situation. Methylphenidate (ritalin), Dextroamphetamine (adderall), or Clonazepam BID. I of course ruled out the stimulants as choices, assuming they'd just cause even further anxiety and fidgettiness, but I guess I may be wrong. Part of my daily anxiety is from lack of confidence, depression, fears, and worrying. But with a psychostimulant at my side, it seemed like my boost of energy and confidence totally crushed all the underlying anxiety for the whole day. It wore off at just about the same time this evening that I took the klonopins. A good 7 hour run, but pretty short from the 13 hours that they apparently advertise.
The same doc had previously given me a 14-day trial of nuvigil, and it provided very similar effects, except nuvigil and provigil are prohistamines, not psychostimulants, so there wasn't much of a high to it. The nuvigil gave me energy and motivation, so that was cool, but due to it's outrageous price since my insurance won't foot the bill (they want me to have narcolepsy or something of the sort, not just depression laziness), I had to discontinue use.
Well. What a post. So basically as things stand, I have no idea why my kpins are not working as they should, don't know if I should switch from a benzo to a stimulant instead, and overall confused.
Thanks for those that take the time to read, it's much appreciated.
Have a good weekend
-Caleb
