My best description of the effects of opiates is as follows.
You haven't tried an opiate before or really experienced the high fully, but then you take a sufficient dose of a strong opiate for the first time. You're just really curious, it seems like the general consensus is that people like these a lot. The feeling is like a warm blanket over every aspect of your physical, mental and emotional self. Physically you feel incredibly relaxed, but not necessary sluggish. Your muscles feel like you just got a massage or something, and there is a euphoria pulsing out of your chest/stomach area. You feel light yet heavy at the same time. Pleasant waves are running through your body from inside out through your extremities. Emotionally, you feel a powerful contentment and euphoria. It feels like everything is right in the world. Your negative emotions are dampened and your positive ones are increased. Nothing can get you down, everything is perfect. Mentally you're a little slowed down, but any anxiety is absolutely destroyed. It's easy to socialize and feel confident in yourself. Self esteem is raised. Everything in life feels easy, wonderful.
You like it a lot, so you want to do it again. You wait a while and do it again. Same thing, this is great. It'll be okay if I keep doing this, I'll stick to every few days. Over time it becomes every other day. Hey no problem, not enough for physical dependence, I could stop anytime I want to, I just don't want to. I'm not addicted, that definitely won't happen to me, I'm not an idiot... says you, to yourself.
Before long you start rationalizing doing it most days, often doing it multiple days in a row. It might take a few weeks, or it might take a year or more, but it happens. It's still the honeymoon period though because you haven't experienced the withdrawals yet. Then one day you do experience withdrawals, maybe you can't get more, maybe you go on vacation and don't bring any, whatever it is. And you're shocked and appalled by how you feel, it's the exact opposite of the opiate feeling. You feel sick, and your limbs are ungodly restless, the constant need to stretch and kick your legs that makes it impossible to sleep. There is pain in your bones. You feel crushingly depressed and overwhelmingly anxious... it feels like everything is the world is shit, you feel a dark and desolate hopelessness that feels like forever. You want to cry about everything. You feel pathetic and worthless.
So, you deal with it for a couple of days and pass the withdrawals. Ahh, cool! Well hey, I'm not actually an
opiate addict, I just went a little too hard and got some withdrawals, I'll take a good break and then use it responsibly. The "good break" isn't as long as you intended it to be. You'e already breaking your rules, you're already an addict, but you haven't admitted it to yourself yet. You try it again after a bit, and assure yourself you'll only do it every 3 days or something, that will avoid withdrawals, right? Well, maybe it would have, but you quickly get back to where you were before. There are little daily rationalizations... "I deserve this today, I had a hard day", or "well, just this one time I'll take it 2 days in a row but I DEFINITELY won't keep doing that". But you do keep doing it. The high still feels great and at some point you become physically dependent again, sooner than you know that you are.
Eventually there comes a time when you don't have it, and you start withdrawing again only this time the withdrawals feel worse and last longer than the first time, and you want opiates more than anything else in the world, you'd do anything to get some opiates to make it go away. And your conscious mind finally acknowledges that are addicted body and mind to opiates, and a tremendous fear and burden settles into your soul. You begin to comprehend the seriousness of your situation, and the honeymoon period is over. You begin to wish you had never tried opiates in the first place. You feel like you would do anything to go back and change that fateful day when curiosity got the better of you and this thing started. You berate the past version of yourself... fucking idiot, you say.
After a while you get past the withdrawals and feel alright, not perfect but pretty good, and you resolve to yourself that you have learned your lesson, no more opiates. And you hold to that for a while, maybe you even make it 8 months like I did. But in the back of your mind, opiates are always there. You get cravings that become stronger and stronger. The thought enters your mind more and more intrusively that you could get some and get high. You start to think that since you learned your lesson, this next time you definitely won't get addicted, right? After all, you're not addicted now, are you? Well, yes, you are, but you've deluded yourself into thinking that just because you're well past the physical part, you're not addicted anymore, even though if you were able to step outside yourself for a moment and think about the thoughts you're having, they make no sense and are clearly rationalizations to get you to do opiates again. Obviously it's not going to go well. But you manage to convince yourself that it will be different this time.
Eventually you do them again. Maybe it's your birthday and you want to "reward" yourself. But if so, it was the worst birthday gift you've ever received. It starts out feeling innocent. You're gonna do it just this once. The high is great but not as great as it used to be. But still, you love it. Okay, I'm gonna put this down now, that was it. But now you feel that draw again, far, far stronger than it was before. Before long, you've convinced yourself to do it again. Before long, it becomes daily again, maybe you even start getting to multiple times a day. And you know you're addicted, and you feel horrible about yourself. You become terrified, afraid of yourself. Your thoughts become almost another entity, your greatest foe. As soon as you allow yourself the possibility that "maybe" you'll do opiates today, there is a spiral of fighting yourself that inevitably and invariably ends with getting opiates and doing them. You experience cycles of doing opiates frequently or even constantly, and then experiencing some or all of the withdrawals. Every time the withdrawals are worse and worse, and you start to feel flat and apathetic and uncomfortable even after the acute withdrawals are over, it's post-acute withdrawal syndrome, and it happens more and more.
While you're using opiates, you promise yourself every single day, passionately, that this is the last time, it's over after this. And every single time, you break your promise to yourself. Over time this wears down your self-esteem. The promises stop feeling passionate and start feeling hollow. You start to loathe yourself, you weak, pathetic person. What is wrong with you? Why did you even make this promise, you knew you were going to break it, you idiot. These are the ways you think about yourself most of the time. When you're high, that goes away, replaced by... basically emptiness. Contentment, with panic around the edges. Even if you don't realize it at the time, the way you feel at your absolute best when you've just done a fat dose of your opiates, is a thousand times less good than the way you felt normally before opiates. Basically you're continuing to do opiates just to feel the closest semblance of normal that is possible when you're beaten down, confused and lost, and your life is likely starting to go to shambles or is already, and your body's reward system is intensely suppressed. You're trying to avoid withdrawals, which produces a state that is the worst you could possibly feel. Those who have not experienced the withdrawals of a deep opiate addiction really can't understand how bad it is. You almost can't even explain how bad it is. It's the most soul-crushingly horrific way to exist that I can imagine, extreme discomfort in every aspect of your existence. Every moment is torture and you can't sleep, and the nights are the worst. Even death would be preferable to this. If forced to endure them, suicide enters your mind frequently just for it to end. You would do ANYTHING for opiates. You NEED them. That's how it feels.
When you're not currently using them or in acute withdrawals, all you can think about is doing them, and before long you give in. This time you don't think you're going to use them responsibly, you're past that, you're honest with yourself that you're a full-blown opiate addict by now. You give in because life feels unlivable without opiates. Your endogenous pleasure system is all fucked up, your opiate receptors are all heavily downregulated and that takes a long while to reset. Meanwhile though, you're experiencing sort of a low-grade withdrawal and discomfort for a long time, months, a year before it would go away, and your life is in shambles so you have stresses to deal with everywhere. So you give in, again.
[Repeat cycle for years and years.]
You begin to realize that you will never escape this, you know in your heart that you're fucked. You might begin to fantasize about suicide, while not actually intending to do it, but the draw of death starts to feel as powerful as the draw of opiates. Almost. You start to wish you would get hit by a bus or something, so it was out of your hands but you got to die. You hate yourself more than you hate anything else except maybe opiates. But you're locked in. Every moment is hell, but since being high on opiates is a lesser hell, you stick with that. What other choice do you have? Well, there is always a choice, but you no longer believe you are capable of making the choice to stop. That realization leaves you numb.
Eventually, perhaps 10 years down the road, you hit your rock bottom. Maybe it's sooner. Probably not later. And you either overdose, kill yourself (maybe by overdosing), or you find the strength somewhere to finally get off of opiates. If you choose the last path, it will be a very difficult and painful road, but eventually you will be able to feel good again, and happy. It will probably involve a lot of life changes and not letting the insane addict part of your brain fool you ever again.
...
I was hooked from the first time I got a proper opiate high. I really was, I see that in retrospect. Obviously I wasn't physically hooked, but I loved it, it was instant perfection in feeling. So the idea was implanted then. It was a constant draw that I didn't even understand was a draw at first, to do opiates and achieve that feeling. It got harder and harder to resist and it was inevitable that I was going to fall down the opiate addiction hole farther and farther until I hit the bottom and either stayed there until I died, or finally get enough sense to say, enough is enough, I feel the draw but I feel the draw more to get out of this insane hellhole. The funny thing is, I could have chosen to break the cycle at any time, because we always have the ability to choose. But I never did choose to, because it took reaching a certain point for me to have the strength to make the choice to turn my back on opiates, that's how strong the draw was for me. No other type of drug, and I've done them all, and still do some of them, has been even close to as intimately intertwined with every aspect of my life, nor had such a strong pull as strong opiates. I consider myself really lucky to have escaped after 10 years of it (it's been 3.5 years now), and I used ibogaine to be honest, I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't.
So that's the real experience of opiates from one end to the other. One of my closest friends died last week from an opiate OD. She was clean for a long time (from opiates anyway, she had a lot of drug problems), and got some pills, we think oxycodone, and shot them up while she was on quite bit of benzos. Now she's gone, she never even got a chance to hit rock bottom. She went through a heavy IV heroin addiction for years, and we all thought opiates were behind her. But the draw still had her after all that time.
Think very, very hard about this if you're thinking of trying opiates. If you haven't gone there yet, stay away. Seriously. The best case scenario you could possibly achieve is that you feel good, come down, and you've gained and lost nothing. But if you're a person who is going to get hooked by opiates, you are probably going to experience something similar to the above. It's not even 1% worth the indescribable hell of opiate addiction to experience the high. If you are a person with an addictive or compulsive personality, trying opiates is about the most foolish thing you could do.
I hope this helps someone avoid what I and so many others have experienced.
