Are opiates really bad for your health?

[bmxgroupie]

I've used Ketamine to the point where it isn't trippy at all for me now and i have a massive tolerance (+ a rotten stomach) and i used to do K at work all the time. Makes the day go really fast and is something to do every hour or so (have a line). Though a few times i got cramps at work.......! NOT FUN! (i used to have 1 pint of beer everyday as well).

Have you tried Benzos before? I'd think they'd be better for work but again the addiction can be very intense.

Oh yeah. I love Valium. Haven't had it for years. But I was doing it at work for a while, till one day I said to my coworker "Mwahhh fawll ish for you?" then I decided to lay off! LOL it's good stuff but made me want to fuck off more than anything.

Never tried K. I wasn't aware of it in my I'll try anything phase. Now I'm old and don't care to do anything out of my comfort zone. Meh. Growing up sucks.

 

[i against i]

opiates are not the best high out there tho they may seem like it for a while. no one drug is. last two nights i've been sat in bed trying to read a book, nodding out after every sentence into a crazy opiate dream, 10 months ago i would have been in absolute heaven, now it's just really fucking irritating. the book was about drug addiction. great book as well, "rational recovery" by jack trimpey

 

[qwe]

Is this how everybody's mind works before they decide to jump into the depths?

i think that many use these medicines to forget problems and get altered, or maybe that's just drug war propaganda. sometimes people forget about the artists and programmers and doctors and others who use the medicines to be productive, and if we can accept an idea like depression is linked to a chemical imbalance, then we should be able to accept the idea that some people have a natural endorphin imbalance, imho.

These are real problems but methinks perhaps I should deal with them in a different way.

probably. it's always a good idea to stay on the legal side of things, too, if you do choose to medicate the mu opioid receptors. aka kratom or poppy seeds for opiates.

I'm looking into to Kratom. I hate fucking speed. It might be as unbearable as mild withdrawals.

kratom hits the mu opioid receptors, you may get a little dopesick if you aren't careful. i also hate stimulants.

i would advise staying away from benzodiazepines. there are memory and cognitive effects of inter-withdrawal that can suck. the same applies to opiates, but not as much imo.

i don't really know about gabapentin/lyrica (something doctors prescribe often it seems). i don't share their confidence that they are "not addictive." they also have cognitive issues.

propranolol or clonidine could help social situations. i've tried it and it makes me too tired, though. all i want to do is take a nap. if it is at a dose where the fatigue isn't noticeable, i can't really tell if it helps or not.

alcohol is worse than all of the above medicines combined. it can mess with your head imo. best to keep moderate, though i think it can help with social lubrication in the right contexts in small amounts.

-

basically, the modern pharmaceutical arsenal sucks. yoga/meditation takes years to develop and isn't necessarily consistent (but is worth it). until the previous century, physical pain was an accepted part of life and even aneasthesia for surgery was debated. hopefully, in our lifetimes, technology will clear our lives of unnecessary mental pain just like during the last century it cleared our lives of quite a bit of unnecessary physical pain. with the DEA arresting doctors, it seems just as controversial to get rid of pain unfortunately.

sorry for the tangent. about the thread question lol, opiates by reducing respiration can reduce oxygen supply. i think that might be an important factor over long periods of time. constipation has its health issues (rest is TMI: unless you have diarea-side IBS, in which case opiates normalize us in our peripheral nervous system; and i think CNS too, since loperamide alone doesn't fully cut it)

other than that, it depends on the opiate. afaik only propoxyphene has significant liver issues. the general consensus imo is they are generally benign on organs, unlike say stimulants which influence metabolism in a potentially unsustainable way.

 

[bmxgroupie]

Soon you will need more and more, not only to achieve your desires effects, but just to keep from being sick.

That caught me by surprise. The part about getting sick if you stay at the same dose. I figured if you stayed the same dose effects would wear off, but you'll actually get sick by not escalating?

 

[bmxgroupie]

opiates are not the best high out there tho they may seem like it for a while. no one drug is. last two nights i've been sat in bed trying to read a book, nodding out after every sentence into a crazy opiate dream, 10 months ago i would have been in absolute heaven, now it's just really fucking irritating. the book was about drug addiction. great book as well, "rational recovery" by jack trimpey

Yeah nothing good n easy ever seems to last. Hey I'm sorry about ripping your post up yesterday. My initial plan was to dissect each and every counterpoint to mine like an attorney on fire, buuut I wasn't getting much work done that way. You just happened to be the one! Cool I'll check it out. Not a huge reader but i recently read some good ones IMO. A bunch of autobiographies: Nikki six. Slash. Steve Adler. Duff mchagen. Both Weilands, Scott and Mary (fucking love them both). And uhhh Anthony keides (prob my least fav). Super interesting if you like that sorta thing.

 

[Jean-Paul]

no, guy. it's like a bucket that keeps getting bigger. as you keep the same dose your tolerance goes up, or you bucket get bigger. so you'll need more just to fill the bucket back up, or get to the level you were originally at. when you withdrawal from opiates, you will need a certain amount to feel normal/not sick and then an amount on top of that to actually feel high.

i swear the "myth" of permanent tolerance is bullshit. maybe that's true for smack itself, but shit, other people can take a handful of vicodin and feel pretty high and i'd might as well take tylenol. maybe i just don't notice or appreciate what they feel because i'm an addict? but it had been half a year, i'd think that'd be enough time.

also for the person who said if you take them for concentration you just end up nodding off all the time - not necessarily true. i had a job that opium very much helped me focus on. i think it's a matter of your personal chemistry. that said, i was drinking opium tea, not shooting up or snorting strong painkillers. it was a distraction when i'd get withdrawal, of course. i had to wean myself about every two weeks and let my tolerance lower. i do remember maybe 2 or 3 days total in almost a year of being on opium at work where i was in anything like a real daze. even then it was just stuff like going to the wrong floors on the elevator as opposed to not doing my work correctly.

 

[pbuilder]

Use/abuse can temporarily/permanently fuck your mental health up though. Damage to ones mental is just as important and serious as physical harm. Especially if the resulting depression or other issues results in suicide.

 

[DoseYouAll]

Mostly it's the APAP in low dose pills like percs and vicodin that will cause you trouble if you're taking high doses often. Other than that I firmly believe the heatlh risks from opiates are completely due to the black market - harmful cuts used for heroin and the things people do to pay for expensive drugs like prositution and also sharing needles. In the context of legalized drugs where they are pure and cheap, you're not going to have negative health effects from opiate drugs beside constipation which is easily fixed with laxatives.

 

[DoseYouAll]

F1n1ished - how did you get pneumonia from putting tar in your nose? The liquid was draining into your lungs or something?

 

[Swimmingdancer]

I am really surprised that so many people claim that opioids have no health effects. If someone were to take opioids for the entire rest of their life they would likely experience fewer adverse effects than someone who took them for a period of time and then stopped, but they still get some. Many of the lasting adverse affects are to the brain and mental state. I went to a brain clinic where they have photos of normal brains compared to the brains of heroin users and they are very different (and this was not in any way to try to convince people to get off drugs, purely for research and determining if there is a treatment to help people with this kind of brain damage, so there was no reason to doubt them). Some effects also depend on the specific opioid, for example methadone is an NMDA antagonist and NMDA antagonists have been shown to cause a specific type of brain damage. Opioids also damage the digestive system, mainly by slowing it. Shall I go on? People don't want to believe that their addiction is bad for them other than being an addiction. I wish someone had told me the truth about opioids before/when I first started using.

 

[Cane2theLeft]

Mostly it's the APAP in low dose pills like percs and vicodin that will cause you trouble if you're taking high doses often. Other than that I firmly believe the heatlh risks from opiates are completely due to the black market - harmful cuts used for heroin and the things people do to pay for expensive drugs like prositution and also sharing needles. In the context of legalized drugs where they are pure and cheap, you're not going to have negative health effects from opiate drugs beside constipation which is easily fixed with laxatives.

I replied to almost this exact same claim recently so I would just like to copy and paste that. (tagged for size, not content).

Spoiler: you couldn't be more wrong

This is purely idiotic. Let us compare...


Center for Disease Control

In 2007, approximately 27,000 unintentional drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States, one death every 19 minutes. Prescription drug abuse is the fastest growing drug problem in the United States. The increase in unintentional drug overdose death rates in recent years (Figure 1) has been driven by increased use of a class of prescription drugs called opioid analgesics (1). Since 2003, more overdose deaths have involved opioid analgesics than heroin and cocaine combined (Figure 2) (1). In addition, for every unintentional overdose death related to an opioid analgesic, nine persons are admitted for substance abuse treatment (2), 35 visit emergency departments (3), 161 report drug abuse or dependence, and 461 report nonmedical uses of opioid analgesics (4). Implementing strategies that target those persons at greatest risk will require strong coordination and collaboration at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels, as well as engagement of parents, youth influencers, health-care professionals, and policy-makers

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6101a3.htm

Food and Drug Administration

Annual APAP-associated Overdoses in the US

-458 deaths
-26,256 hospitalizations
-56,680 ED visits

http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/02/slides/3882S1_05_Nourjah-Ahmad-Karwoski.pdf

A few other things to consider - the percentage of the population that uses opioids recreationally is a tiny fraction of those who use APAP therapeutically yet there are exponentially higher fatalities from opioids and this doesn't even factor in the lives ruined by opioid addiction and dependence that are exponentially higher than just the lives lost. Furthermore, among the hospitalizations and ED visits that APAP cause, most of those are in people who abuse alcohol and already have liver damage from such.

To act like opioids are safer than APAP is silly and just the material people who use opioids convince themselves of to rationalize their decisions.

I'm of course not saying that APAP is safe and doesn't cause problems however to act like it's the scourge of the planet and opioids are a godsend free of problems requires willful ignorance.

As you can see, that is objectively comparing the safety of pharmaceutical (not cut to shit street tar or something) to acetominophen based on how often people seek some form of treatment for either or accidentally FUCKING DIE.

You're deluding yourself thinking opioids are safer than APAP or the only reason they are harmful is due to cuts and so forth. Opioids are dangerous and you have to willfully ignore every factual post in this thread to convince yourself otherwise.

 

[Swimmingdancer]

I replied to almost this exact same claim recently so I would just like to copy and paste that. (tagged for size, not content).


As you can see, that is objectively comparing the safety of pharmaceutical (not cut to shit street tar or something) to acetominophen based on how often people seek some form of treatment for either or accidentally FUCKING DIE.

You're deluding yourself thinking opioids are safer than APAP or the only reason they are harmful is due to cuts and so forth. Opioids are dangerous and you have to willfully ignore every factual post in this thread to convince yourself otherwise.

But I think they're saying aside from the possibility of overdose and all the problems that come with addiction/dependence, would pure opioids have real adverse and lasting physical health effects. And IMO the answer is YES! Particularly to the brain.

Plus it's ridiculous to theoretically discount all the problems that go alongside with opioid use and addiction, and ignore the fact that drugs are not pure, especially street drugs like heroin, and ignore the fact that there can be damage from the ROA and that no one uses the absolute safest practices all the time, and ignore the risk of overdose and death. Because in reality there is never going to be a person who only uses completely pure opioids, only takes them by mouth, has an unlimited supply and never waits long enough to go into withdrawals, never stops taking them, and takes the exact right amount of fiber and laxatives and super-healthy diet to completely avoid constipation or other digestive issues (and doesn't get any side effects or tolerance from said laxatives). And even if such a magical person did exist, they would still have adverse mental and physical effects.

It's like people are just looking for justification to use.

I know people who have very serious brain damage and are in comas from smoking heroin, but people in another thread like this one discounted that as a permanent health risk because "it doesn't happen to everyone" . *rolls eyes*

 

[BabyGurl3171]

Opioid abuse is bad for your health. First, opioids cause dry mouth or lack of saliva in your mouth can create all sorts of problems for your teeth and gums. Second, opioids often cause nausea and vomiting, long-term nausea and vomiting can cause a lot of damage to the esophagus. Long-term opioid use causes constipation and long-term constipation can lead to severe gastrointestinal illnesses and diseases, including ruptures of the intestines. There are a number of other problems which opioids cause in long-term use.

Just wanted to butt in here
I have lost 2 teeth bc of constant cotton mouth from oxy, thankfully they were in the back. But yeah, they cracked bad & dentist asked if I had a condition causin the dry mouth..
Then, as a semi-recovered bulemic/anorexic I can attest to vomitin wreakin havoc on your insides. I have to take a PPI to try to keep the acid at bay & still wake up more times than not with acid comin out my nose.. Yeah, that's so much fun to wake up like that & not be able to catch your breath.. /sarcasm.
Thirdly, ever hear of an anal fissure? Look it up, NOT fun. After 3 separate occassions, I had to have a fissurectomy. They cut my ass, sewed up the 3 mm fissure, stuffed my ass with cotton & sent me on my way.. You can't even imagine that pain! I have 5 kids & I would rather have them back to back NATURAL than to ever have that fissure surgery again.. Horrific!

 

[Swimmingdancer]

Just wanted to butt in here
I have lost 2 teeth bc of constant cotton mouth from oxy, thankfully they were in the back. But yeah, they cracked bad & dentist asked if I had a condition causin the dry mouth..
Then, as a semi-recovered bulemic/anorexic I can attest to vomitin wreakin havoc on your insides. I have to take a PPI to try to keep the acid at bay & still wake up more times than not with acid comin out my nose.. Yeah, that's so much fun to wake up like that & not be able to catch your breath.. /sarcasm.
Thirdly, ever hear of an anal fissure? Look it up, NOT fun. After 3 separate occassions, I had to have a fissurectomy. They cut my ass, sewed up the 3 mm fissure, stuffed my ass with cotton & sent me on my way.. You can't even imagine that pain! I have 5 kids & I would rather have them back to back NATURAL than to ever have that fissure surgery again.. Horrific!

Yeah, opioids are bad for your teeth. And people keep saying that digestive system issues don't count because they are avoidable because you could just take laxatives all the time, but IME that doesn't actually work. My digestive system is permanently messed up from using opiates for so long. Sorry to hear about your mouth and your ass :-( My teeth got pretty bad after using opiates too and I lost 2 as well, and that was with brushing and flossing 2x a day.

 

[BabyGurl3171]

Yeah, opioids are bad for your teeth. And people keep saying that digestive system issues don't count because they are avoidable because you could just take laxatives all the time, but IME that doesn't actually work. My digestive system is permanently messed up from using opiates for so long. Sorry to hear about your mouth and your ass :-( My teeth got pretty bad after using opiates too and I lost 2 as well, and that was with brushing and flossing 2x a day.

Ugh, I hate when people told me "you coulda just used laxatives". Well, they aren't typically safe for long term use & I actually did anyway and still got all fucked up.
I won't lie, I love my opiates but there comes a time to pay the piper..
Thanks dancer =)

 

[Cane2theLeft]

Just wanted to say swimming has some stellar posts in here... you've been an exemplary addition to the forums lately. kudos... PLEASE stick around!

 

[xxxyyy]

Opioid abuse is bad for your health. First, opioids cause dry mouth or lack of saliva in your mouth can create all sorts of problems for your teeth and gums. Second, opioids often cause nausea and vomiting, long-term nausea and vomiting can cause a lot of damage to the esophagus. Long-term opioid use causes constipation and long-term constipation can lead to severe gastrointestinal illnesses and diseases, including ruptures of the intestines. There are a number of other problems which opioids cause in long-term use.

this is only true to a certain extent. most of these things will become far less or completely vanish with prolonged use, even though i use opiates very rarely they haven't made me vomit in countless years. also the lack of saliva is far less pronounced than from amphetamines or neuroleptics for example and the negative consequences for the teeth can be controlled by good dental hygiene, and these mouth-sprays that are exactly for that. i have no idea what are in them or if it really helps, but my grandfather beat cancer years ago and because of a combination of radio/chemotherapy he had a saliva production so minimal for months that it was close to non-existant, and would spray his mouth every few minutes. his teeth did not become drastically worse, and yeah, constipation can be a problem for some, but it's not a general rule that every user gets horribly constipated. i have no idea of the frequency of this happening, but even when i used for longer periods, constipation never got so bad that it was a problem. sure, i might spend an hour on the toilet, but i never had 'long-term constipation', and when my mother was dying of cancer and thus on a 24/7 painkiller regimen, constipation could be brought to an acceptable level with laxatives and enemas.
i'm not saying that constipation is not common or that it couldn't be a potentially serious problem, but most of the symptoms are treatable and manageable, for quite a long time.

sorry for any grammar/spelling errors, i'm on a mixture of 90mg mirtazapine and 6mg etizolam.

now, back to the original question. i've heard a few times that meperidine/pethidine is for some reason both more addictive and damaging than most other opioids. the first time i read that was years ago in an appendum to burroughs' seminal naked lunch, but that i took with a grain of salt, because all of that were opinions of a very heavy user and was drawn from personal experience and not any scientific fat, but his writing about THC, morphine and cocaine is spot on. while most of the things he said about the various drugs there are true, a few clearly aren't. a few years ago, i read an article on pethidine and why the author thought it should not be used anymore at all, as it offered only disadvantages over more traditional painkillers like morphine or oxycodone. one of the points he made was that pethidine's is so very different from most structure, and that gave it a huge lists of drugs that may produce an adverse reaction, drugs that would be no problem to be used with most other "classical" painkillers. i'll try to find that article and post it.

okay, here it is. i'm about 70% sure that that was the study i read. it's in .pdf, and i'm too tired to read it now (it's 4am and i just took my goodnight dose of etizolam.) unless i grabbed the wrong pdf, it's a pretty consive destruction of pethidine/meperidine myth. an interessiert read, mainly for how much it was pushed when it came out, as something less addictive, benign and all-around useful.
and this is the paper that pretty much refutes all the claims the pharma companies made, unfortunately i'm too tired to go through it now, if someone's still interessted, i'll do it tomorrow. and if it the wrong paper, my apologies.

study on miperidine/pethidine, PDF, adobe reader required

 

[Swimmingdancer]

Just because not everyone gets all the adverse effects does not mean they don't exist or don't count. And I noticed no one has disputed the adverse effects on the brain, which can be very dehabilitating. If a particular issue, like tooth decay, can possibly be prevented/treated by using a special mouth spray every few minutes that still doesn't erase it as a side-effect, you wouldn't have to treat it in the first place without using opioids. I'm not saying there aren't plenty of drugs that are equally bad for you or worse, or that the health effects at all warrant the "War on Drugs", just that it's willful denial to claim that there are no adverse mental or physical effects from long-term use of opioids.

Just wanted to say swimming has some stellar posts in here... you've been an exemplary addition to the forums lately. kudos... PLEASE stick around!

Aw thanks Cane I have been spending way too much time on these forums, lol. The issue in this particular thread is kind of a pet peeve of mine because I really wish someone had told me the truth about the damage caused by heroin before/when I started using. I read somewhere that there were no health effects and I thought to myself "Well I will just not let myself get addicted or OD", lol. Also of course I couldn't fully comprehend how bad being addicted was and how horrible withdrawals were, I had read that they were "flu-like symptoms lasting for 48 hours".

 

[xxxyyy]

hey sorry, i didn't want to come off as some arrogant prick, but i had four close relatives die of cancer in the last 11 years, and off course there will be a lot of strong opiates/opioids administred a lot.
and a lot of people react differently to any given drug, etc. etc. my point, more or less, is that when someone is terminal it really doesn't matter much either way, but if you use recreationally, have medicinal-grade gear (not likely to happen, but hey), and know exactly what dosages and ROAs you can use that are safe, without taking too much then you can have a long, long habit with minimal negative health effects. i can say, that a doctor who shoots up, i don't know 4-5 injections of pure morphine every day, everything sterile and shit can do this for 20 years and do less damage to his body than i did through a through say 5 years with my alcoholism and pack of unfiltered camel a day habit.

i've also heard of worse side effects, like people losing their teeth or hair- i think one was from prolonged dhc or oxy use, i'm not sure and the other took codeine pills for staggering ages, something like 25 years or so, and shitloads of them - but these are rather rare.

edit: also, i really didn't want to imply that opiods are harmless. they cause massive physical and psychological addiction, but purely from how they damage your body they are fairly benign if properly used and if

edit2: i didn't want to make it sound like i think everyone should use opiates. it's just compared to almost all other hard(er) drugs, they do significantly less damage, if your shit's pure. and also their side effects are a lot less severe and much better managable than from say, meth or crack, no matter how pure.

 

[Chubbs_Peterson]

Interesting read!

Can I ask the same but about Tramadol, because I know it's an Opioid. (Despite what the nurses tell me, LOL.)

Does Tramadol have adverse effects on the liver/kidneys? And to the libido discussion I find that Tramadol makes me horny as hell just completely unable to function! Haha

At my most frequent usage of Tramadol I was taking maybe 14 50mg tabs (NOT all at once) once a week on a weekend or sometimes both Sat and Sunday, nothing like a regular every day habit/addiction... I treat it much the same as alcohol. I enjoy it once in a while!