• 💊 OTHER DRUGS 💊 Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Notable Threads 1 Notable Threads 2
    Dangerous Combos Addiction Support
    Emergency Services Benzo Guide v.1
    Addiction Stories Scary Case Studies
    Biology, Pharmacology & Drugs 101
  • Select Your Topic Then Scroll Down
    Alcohol Bupe Benzos
    Cocaine Heroin Opioids
    RCs Stimulants Misc
    Harm Reduction All Topics Gabapentinoids
    Tired of your habit? Struggling to cope?
    Want to regain control or get sober?
    Visit our Recovery Support Forums

Benzos why is it that alprazolam withdrawals are so much worse than any other benzo withdrawls?

LivingOnValium

LivingOnValium

Bluelighter
Joined
Aug 24, 2006
Messages
2,800
Location
Helsinki, Finland
Obviously the duration use and the dosage comes to play here as well but in general alprazolam has the ability to debilitate me to the point i'm a total basket case.

Rivotril/Klonopin which is about equipotent and causes also soul crushing withdrawals but alprazolam takes it a notch further.

Also if you got a heavy alprazolam habit, ca. 10mg/day or more, there's no point to try to stabilise yourself on milder benzos. Diazepam, lorazepam, nitrazepam, temazepam, oxazepam (lol what a joke. i'm offended that it's even classified as a benzo despite it having the correct chemical structure), flurazepam etc. they might offer some relief but they wont take away the agony. Clonazepam works the best if alprazolam isn't available but it still doesn't fully cut it.

Why the hell is this? My guess is that the triazolobenzos (at least the more potent ones) are in the class of their own. They totally fucking hijack your gaba system and hold it for hostage the ransom being the same amount of alprazolam every day. By the way im on 4mg alprazolam atm. was supposed to take 2 week break but managed 5 days, doh.
 
Short duration combined with the fact that the dose is so small. Doctors generally start people off at 0.25mg-0.5mg once or twice daily. So if you've worked up to 10mg you're taking a very heavy dose.
 
I agree with you but the point is that if you take equipotent (as heavy as 10mg alprazolam) dose daily the withdrawls are sure hellish but still not as bad as they get with 10mg alprazolam habit.

I've discussed this with plenty of people with lots of benzo experience below their belt and all of them tend do agree. Moist of them also like xanax the best one for recreation.

I currently don't even have a daily xanax habat though i abuse the hell out of it biweekly.
 
LivingOnValium said:
Why the hell is this? My guess is that the triazolobenzos (at least the more potent ones) are in the class of their own.
Click to expand...
I think you're right on the money, even though I can't think of a good reason why it should be true.

I had a psychiatrist tell me about working in the ER, where he saw a patient who was in severe Xanax W/Ds. He was seizing badly, which made it impossible to administer any oral alprazolam. They shot him full of lorazepam and diazepam over and over, but to no avail.... the patient ultimately died.

I was pretty horrified by that story. You'd think lorazepam should substitute for alprazolam in the right dose since they are used similarly. But from this anecdote at least, there is something clearly different about alprazolam and maybe the other triazolos.

Hypnotic benzos affect different subunits of the Gaba-A receptor and they are more intoxicating (subjectively and in objective CNS depression). So it makes sense that W/D would be harsher, and that anxiolytics might not fully cover for them.

But alprazolam is nowhere as hypnotic as many others with milder W/Ds. I would guess that even severe Rohypnol W/Ds could be managed with unlimited Valium injections, at least better than in that story, but I'm not sure.... It would be interesting to know how midazolam, an imidazolo-benzo, compares.
 
Last edited:
Negentropic said:
alprazolam works more on the reward circuitry more so than other benzos, this is going to make withdrawals worse

just as in heroin withdrawal being worse than lesser opioids
Click to expand...
I would say opioid withdrawal is generally based on half life not recreational potential of opioids.

Fent and heroin withdrawal is far easier than methadone or bupe imo
 
LucidSDreamr said:
I would say opioid withdrawal is generally based on half life not recreational potential of opioids.

Fent and heroin withdrawal is far easier than methadone or bupe imo
Click to expand...

I'd agree to disagree, everyone has their own internal chemistry. This topic is highly anecdotal from any perspective anyways and hard to quantitate.

I've never had methadone wds, but fentanyl analogue withdrawal was considerably worse than any heroin/bupe withdrawal I experienced. Speaking from the cold turkey experience.

But this is just my own view based on past experiences.

Also when we say "fent" I assume we're talking about a myriad of fent/fent analogues each with different properties. Pure pharma fent has a shorter half life than heroin, other fent analogues have longer ones. Those blue m30s are not fentanyl, but analogues of fentanyl (obviously I can't prove this but it's been my experience).

And from all the junkies I've talked to most say fent wd is worse than heroin wd. I can't comment on methadone. Bupe was never nearly as bad as other wds for me.
 
LucidSDreamr said:
I would say opioid withdrawal is generally based on half life not recreational potential of opioids.

Fent and heroin withdrawal is far easier than methadone or bupe imo
Click to expand...
I strongly disagree for me anyways. This past year i've detoxed off fent and methadone. Even in 10 years detoxing off all 3 this new street femt is by far the worst. Methadone last longer but less intense.

The 1/2 life seems to come into play. Same with opioids, the shorter 1/2 life the shorter the detox but more intense . A long 1/2 life is a little less intense but last longer. With all w/d your mind plays the biggest part. If you think ..... this is gonna hurt worse then the last drug .... it will.
 
Negentropic said:
Also when we say "fent" I assume we're talking about a myriad of fent/fent analogues each with different properties. Pure pharma fent has a shorter half life than heroin, other fent analogues have longer ones. Those blue m30s are not fentanyl, but analogues of fentanyl (obviously I can't prove this but it's been my experience).
Click to expand...
Actually, it's almost all fentanyl-proper now. That's the active ingredient in the pills and the powders, because that's essentially the only synthetic opiate the cartel labs produce. (At least for the time being.... Stay tuned for an exclusive report "Isotonitazene: Is it really coming down the pike?")Te

The analogues that used to be common have mostly gone by the wayside, a relic of the wild and woolly direct-from-China days, or the "USPS-DIY-DEA" era, when any feckless lad with a small nest egg at his disposal could step right and stake his claim as a freelance fentrepreneur....

The only real difference between illicit and medical fentanyl is in the salts, which has little impact in real life. Fentanyl citrate is the kind approved for medical use in the US and fentanyl hydrochloride is what is synthesized in Mexico. In practice, they're probably as similar as the ibuprofen sodium in your regular Advil tablets and the ibuprofen potassium that is in the LiquiGels (along with the free acid).

Once upon a time in America, morphine was still the main street opiate outside of NYC/NJ/Philly. During the 1920s, Jewish syndicates smuggled in massive shipments of morphine from Central Europe, and in the 1930s the Japanese Empire officially sanctioned drug smuggling as a tool of foreign policy where China and the US were concerned. Then, as now, the dominant form in US medicine was morphine sulphate, but most of the contraband that hit the street was morphine hydrochloride. Other than allowing the drug cops of the day to distinguish between morph from organized import and MS from domestic diversion, users didn't seem to notice a difference.

Salts aside, there are traces of precursors and intermediate steps due to a less sophisticated synthesis, but the biggest surprise about illicit fentanyl is really about everything *but* the drug itself. First of all, the final product made in a lab is never more than 40-50% fentanyl HCL, which surprised me. That means it's essentially "pre-diluted" by the nature of the manufacture, but that's not comes to the US....

No, they never ship any of it over the border without diluting the shit out of it even further, until it's down in the 5-10% pure range. So that popular meme/PSA -- the one probably captioned "The Reason Fentanyl Is Replacing Heroin in One Simple Picture" that had a picture of a grain of salt on one penny and a little pile of powder on another -- it was just as misleading as it was effective. Personally, I bought that line, thinking:"...:unsure:...hmm yeah, right, fentanyl is like 35x the strength of pure heroin, so they can just smuggle in a kilo of it in a backpack rather load up a trunk, obviously that's why...:unsure:"

But no, the multiplier in potency is much more modest in real life -- like 1.8x at 5% and 3.6% at 10%... so the average fentanyl coming into this country is stronger than heroin by about 2.5x...which is exactly how much stronger heroin is than morphine! The potency/compactness-smuggling issue is a total red herring. Today's cartels have no trouble smuggling anything into the US, in any quantity they choose. It's a breeze for them in general and of course they factor in the expected "inventory loss" when they set production and pricing, the same way Target does.

The real of advantage of fentanyl over heroin is the ease of manufacture. It may be cheaper to import precursors from China and synthesize them into fentanyl than it is to harvest opium and convert it into heroin, but I can't be certain. What *is* certain, though, is how much easier it is to conceal a fentanyl lab or even "superlab" than it is to conceal acres upon acres of poppy plants... and easier still, when you have only to conceal your lab from the bribable law enforcement in charge of your locality, but you have conceal your poppies from DEA helicopter surveillance, airborne defoliants, Army bonfires, etc.
 
Jennn said:
I strongly disagree for me anyways. This past year i've detoxed off fent and methadone. Even in 10 years detoxing off all 3 this new street femt is by far the worst. Methadone last longer but less intense.

The 1/2 life seems to come into play. Same with opioids, the shorter 1/2 life the shorter the detox but more intense . A long 1/2 life is a little less intense but last longer. With all w/d your mind plays the biggest part. If you think ..... this is gonna hurt worse then the last drug .... it will.
Click to expand...
I think taper and dependency levels make a big difference.

But in a scenario where you are free to do a taper however you please...I think fent is the easiest of any opioid. Especially by using patches cut down smaller and smaller.

I have little experience cold turkey from high dependence on anything other than fent because I always do good tapers. So I can't speak to cold turkey from High dosage well.
 
LivingOnValium said:
Obviously the duration use and the dosage comes to play here as well but in general alprazolam has the ability to debilitate me to the point i'm a total basket case.

Rivotril/Klonopin which is about equipotent and causes also soul crushing withdrawals but alprazolam takes it a notch further.

Also if you got a heavy alprazolam habit, ca. 10mg/day or more, there's no point to try to stabilise yourself on milder benzos. Diazepam, lorazepam, nitrazepam, temazepam, oxazepam (lol what a joke. i'm offended that it's even classified as a benzo despite it having the correct chemical structure), flurazepam etc. they might offer some relief but they wont take away the agony. Clonazepam works the best if alprazolam isn't available but it still doesn't fully cut it.

Why the hell is this? My guess is that the triazolobenzos (at least the more potent ones) are in the class of their own. They totally fucking hijack your gaba system and hold it for hostage the ransom being the same amount of alprazolam every day. By the way im on 4mg alprazolam atm. was supposed to take 2 week break but managed 5 days, doh.
Click to expand...
Bcs mfokrzzz from PFIZER are evil cunts by selling this shitty bitter tasting pill thst makes you retarded and you have to keep redosing and redosing. Xanax is the crack cocaine from benzos ugh.
 
BenzoBrain^^ said:
Damn, I thought this was when phenobarbital is used until patient is stabilized.
Click to expand...
Damn, thst sounds like an awful death. Yeah... I think like you they should have administered potent barbs instead of lorazepam or valium if the guy was siezing like a mofo. Well, doctors would be amazed if they knew the vast quantity of psychotropic drugs we addicts consume. Playing with gabaergics is worse than heroin tbfh.
 
LucidSDreamr said:
I would say opioid withdrawal is generally based on half life not recreational potential of opioids.

Fent and heroin withdrawal is far easier than methadone or bupe imo
Click to expand...
This is a highky subjetive topic. Im not even chipping in with my two cents in this one. All i'm saying there are millions of people out there who disagree with you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top