opanas were around here? where if you dont mind me asking? also, how long ago? I never got the offer on one. also, when you're talking about the 80's are you talking about the old school 80's or the garbage time release shit out today?
The good opanas came and went very quickly before they were changed to the 'tamper-resistant' formulation. I'm talking just a 2 year window of the good ones becoming popular and being around before they turned to shit with the new formulation. It was like 2010 - 2012 that they were all the rave, and shortly after the OxyContin changed formulas the Opanas followed suit.
I was hearing a lot about the Opanas in 2010-2011, and when I graduated from college in 2011 and retuned home I actually came across some my first week back, then got 2 more in the fall of 2011 and that was it. The weird thing about the old formulation was that the 10's gelled up more than the 40's making the latter easier to abuse. With the 10s you had to sniff a tiny bit at a time and then blow your nose once you absorbed the first line and were ready for another line, but with the 40s you could just sniff the whole thing with no problem.
Another dangerous factor with Opana was the widely varying BA based on the different ROAs. The oral BA was only 10% but then the intransal was 40% so you were getting 4x as much opana by sniffing it, which causes a lot of issues for the sniffers when they changed to the new formulation that prevented you from sniffing it. Along with the large increase in BA between the ROAs it was a very potent drug so if you tried sniffing the same dose that you usually ate you could be in dangerous territory. When you throw IV in the mix it's even more dangerous especially for those that took it orally before trying to IV it given that they would be getting a 10-fold increase in BA, along with getting the full dose all at once.
I'm sure that the majority of the people that switched to IVing it were already sniffing it rather than taking it orally, so in that case the increase in BA was similar to that of heroin with the person getting a little over 2x the dose that they would get when sniffed, so I'm sure that you can see how that caused a lot of overdoses for those that had not done the proper research on the drug and didn't adjust their dose accordingly in respect to the BA.
And finally, yet another issue with Opana was how much it increased people's tolerances. I've never heard people blame a drug for jacking their tolerance up the way that people did with opana. I think that one of the reasons for this was that although it was very potent I think that most people found it to be less euphoric than other opiates / opioids such as heroin and oxycodone, so they would take larger doses of opana than its equivalent in heroin or oxycodone in an attempt to get the same level of euphoria out of the drug. This would have them nodding out hard as opana was known to be one of the most sedative opioids, while it also increased the persons tolerance.
So to tie this in with suboxone (this is the suboxone mega thread after all), it was one of the more difficult opioids to transition back to bupe after abusing it for a while, due to its high potency which the ceiling dose of suboxone had a hard time covering.
