How long can you be on DXM?

[SPC123]

I only discovered that DXM "worked" for me last Sunday. Since then it's all I want to do. I suffer from chronic wrist pain, depression and anxiety, but for some reason all are fine when I take 600-700mg DXM. I would like to be on it for the rest of my life, but I assume that's impossible. So how often can the average DXM user trip?

 

[Frydea]

dxm for the rest of your life? good luck even semi functioning as a normal human being.

 

[Psyke]

Once a month. TOPS

 

[SPC123]

Well I have already done it 3 days in a row with no discernible drawbacks. So once a month seems needlessly aggressive.

 

[shady4091]

Well of course you COULD be on it for quite a while I'd imagine. Probably a couple weeks before tolerance keeps you from feeling anything without upping your dose to a ridiculous amount.

Now whether or not you're going to completely and permanently destroy your brain is a different story... I'd say you're already in the danger zone.

 

[SPC123]

Actual brain damage usually requires trauma or prolonged lack of oxygen. Anecdotal correlation on the internet dose not press a persuading argument...

Also it's the only thing I enjoy anymore. Without DXM I may have offed myself. So in the interest of harm reduction, does anyone have any insight that can be backed by citation or credentials?

 

[folding_space]

The fact that you don't enjoy anything other than DXM is the problem. If you continue to abuse it, eventually you will cease to enjoy it as well and will be thrown into even deeper depression than where you started. In the interest of harm prevention, you should quit now and come to terms with your problems in a healthy way. This is the only reasonable answer you'll get.

 

[Solipsis]

That it helped you could be traced back to it's SRI effect properties I guess..

What I wonder myself is if tolerance sets in slower or faster than with ketamine? And is that tolerance as difficult to reverse i.e. is NMDA antagonist tolerance basically always the same in that respect? If so I suspect that it works as chronic cross-tolerance then? I got chronic K tolerance and it seems to me like it prevents me from getting any good effects from MXE even since the first time I tried MXE...

Sorry to add more questions instead of answering.

 

[m060mm]

Well I have already done it 3 days in a row with no discernible drawbacks. So once a month seems needlessly aggressive.

There are short-term side effects and then there are long-term. Unfortunately, many people fail to quit smoking until they not only have cancer, but severe side effects.

edit:

Actual brain damage usually requires trauma or prolonged lack of oxygen. Anecdotal correlation on the internet dose not press a persuading argument...

Also it's the only thing I enjoy anymore. Without DXM I may have offed myself. So in the interest of harm reduction, does anyone have any insight that can be backed by citation or credentials?

There's also a lot we don't know still. I often want tangible evidence before I'm persuaded too, but I feel you're asking for citations because you know there are none.

Trauma isn't limited to physical shock. Until you can find citations showing that your dose/kg of DXM is not neurotoxic, I imagine everyone will be speaking in anecdotes.

 

[sekio]

If you're taking 700+mg dxm a day, do realize that metabolites will accumulate. Eventually you'll have to lower your dose or you'll black out. You may want to correlate your doses to the relief of symptoms and try to titrate to a reasonable level of DXM.

The syrups, gels etc are probably worse for your body than the DXM is. As long as you keep in mind its effects as a SNRI and dissociative I see no reason you couldn't do some sort of long term DXM therapy.

 

[SPC123]

True I suppose. There really isn't all that much peer reviewed information to be had. That said, it seems to me that psychedelics are among the safest class of drug.

Surely if an alcoholic can go years without being sober there must be other drugs along those same lines. Unfortunately for me weed make me really anxious, to the point of panic attack. I have to find other ways to make life tolerable.

 

[Qnick]

I've known a few people who took DXM near daily for several months because it made them feel more 'normal' and 'at ease in their own skin', but all three of them experienced significant hardship when they finally stopped. They are all able to recognize now that the DXM wrecked havoc on their ability to think clearly and quickly for quite a while afterwards. I wish I could tell you their dosages but I have no clue really, just that they would get several bottles a day and dose impulsively.


Seriously, for your own sake, take a step back and look at what you're asking. You've been on DXM for three days in a row and have now convinced yourself that if you don't take DXM forever you're going to be horribly depressed and suicidal. Maybe you are depressed but DXM will only exacerbate that in the long run.

And the whole "I've been on it for three days and haven't noticed any drawbacks" line is shockingly short-sighted. People on meth can stay up for days and days and feel great, but its when they have to come down that the heavy problems start.


If you are doing this for self medication as you say you *need* to realize that your attitude towards your depression is as much a problem towards overcoming it at the depression itself. You're really setting yourself up for a shit-show a few months down the line that could take you years to recover from.

And I know you may write this off since I can't give you articles and citations, but I have seen a few good friends get much stupider from heavy DXM use, and I know how slippery of a slope self-medicating with an attitude like yours can be.

Please be careful.

 

[bluedolphin]

Yeah I was going to say what Sekio said there... all the ingredients in cough syrup like saccharin and aspartame and whatever other shit in there will fuck up your health quick.

Also DXM is just not easy enough on the body to take regularly, unless it's a low dose.

Have you tried 150mg and found it not to relieve depression and anxiety? 700mg is (SHOULD) be a full-blown trip. That's more than medical.

I don't know if it's a good idea to say this but I spent the last 9 months self medicating for the same reasons with Methoxetamine. It's a lot safer (in my opinion) than DXM for regular use. You only need 10-20mg to achieve antidepressant effects and that lasts several or more hours.

But I should note that I quit this regimen when I noticed it was raising my blood pressure and had caused me to lose 10 pounds over 9 months. Not a big loss, and my BP was really not that bad either, but I decided to find a healthier way to go about things.

 

[SPC123]

I talked to my doctor today who suggested I increase my venlafaxine dose by 50% and go back to taking oxy. He also said he'd rather scrip me fentanyl or dilaudid rather than have me self medicating with a mixture of scrip'd stuff (opiates and benzos) and OTC DXM or codeine preparations.

 

[shady4091]

He's not talking about low-dose therapeutic use of daily DXM. He's talking about tripping out everyday to escape. You shouldn't need citations and resources to know that this is a BAD fucking idea...

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

I talked to my doctor today who suggested I increase my venlafaxine dose by 50% and go back to taking oxy. He also said he'd rather scrip me fentanyl or dilaudid rather than have me self medicating with a mixture of scrip'd stuff (opiates and benzos) and OTC DXM or codeine preparations.

Listen to your doc, your pain help is from its anesthetic action I'd imagine, and I can't see this property lasting with continued use and tolerance, you'd just get more and more negative side effects.

 

[Balltripper1]

I wouldnt say more than once a week and thats pushing it, I used to drink between 360mg and 720mg almost every weekend but I grew out of it. You need to give your brain time to recover or you will probably suffer from some kind of brain damage. I found that with frequent use it gave me slight speech problems such as shuddering and just saying words wrong in general. If you start to notice that I would give it a break for a bit, but that's just me.

 

[SPC123]

I was just wondering if DXM could be taken like THC. Psych issues run in families and I know a lot of my aunts, uncles and cousins are pretty chronic, but it works for them. It just doesn't work for me.

 

[Solipsis]

I was just wondering if DXM could be taken like THC. Psych issues run in families and I know a lot of my aunts, uncles and cousins are pretty chronic, but it works for them. It just doesn't work for me.

Taken like THC, what do you mean - in the sense that THC is pretty harmless to the body? I don't react very well to DXM but anyway it gives me pretty feverish high blood pressure and heachache side-effects and quite a few more. Not sure if this is mostly down to personal enzyme populations and biochemistry that affects metabolism pathways but I imagine that a mild form of such side-effects is normal for DXM which is not healthy at all.

Also THC might me easy on the body, if you take it a lot I honestly don't think it has a good influence on your mental state. I feel like a haze or fog is hanging around my head when I smoke a lot, though this can be a bit difficult to signal when you are in the middle of it. But one of the typical major things is a worse short term memory. When I abstain and the fog lifts, that's when I do notice my deprivation full-on, it shocked me somewhat on a few occasions after a long period of regular use. It's similar with ketamine for me although that has more serious consequences for things like language (like speech impairment, stutters) and my overview of time and space such as with schedule planning and orientation. I guess the change of perspective to something more 'meta' has a long-term effect this way and just spaces me out. I don't see why it should be much different with DXM, it is a dissociative.

 

[lazydullard]

blehh its not true. I've been doing DXM daily for a month now, and have gone longer than that in the past. I dose 360mg in the morning, then either do just 360mg more midday, or sometimes ~700mg. I've been doing this for a month. I ride my bike 4 miles to the walmart to buy the stuff, then I ride my bike 2 more miles to the Safeway for my evening dose, then I hit a second safeway for the next morning's dose. So I'm healthy enough to bike 10 miles everyday while getting and being high on DXM.

Although I take one day off during the week sober. That day I pretty much just sleep all day. DXM isn't toxic by any means, and nothing in the syrups are either.