Dear BLUELIGHT,
Pardon the "[Trigger Warning]" but I appreciate some people are sensitive even in the mayhem of the world of addiction and my story is in some part contrary to dominant narratives. I'm not sure many will read this: I know I didn't read the success stories when I visited this forum some months back, but instead went straight for the most mortifying and dooming threads, as well as for the "Just the facts Ma'am" sorts. That said, I vowed once before in life I'd revisit a forum, twice actually, if I ever solved the problem prompting my visit and post my success story; and did; so this makes a third. Hope anyone reading can find some solace and know there is hope: if I did it, so can you... there are a few caveats as you will see... anyway, on with the story.
-This was my third time using benzodiazepines. Once when I was 20 and my well meaning but naïve parents suggested I see a psychologist due to not having much direction in life. After going through her inventory she promptly referred my to a psychiatrist, who proceeded to prescribed me a whack of pills. My first stop after the pharmacy was the library, (this being in the days before the 'Net), leading me to quickly discover that excepting clonazepam, the other drugs had quite nasty side-effects so I flushed them and berated the shrink for not forewarning me. What he should have forewarned me about too was the addictive potential of benzos, but fortunately I realized that and that he was a quack after a month: long enough to make a doped-out buffoon of myself and discontinue my appointments with the irresponsible medical "professional", something which is sadly common: you are perhaps reading this now because you too were a victim of such unscrupulous doctors? My second time was short lived, I had been more stressed than usual and asked at a clinic for a script which the doctor promptly wrote me up; nothing worth mentioning came of it being older and wiser by that time.
-The relevant story starts a decade or so later in a land far far away where you can buy any drug you like at the pharmacy without prescription, and if not, order it online, or import it: assuming you can navigate, in a foreign language, custom's myriad of paperwork and corruption. This all started as a curiosity with nootropics, and being a PhD student, in second year by the time, and having being an expatriate long enough to be ignorant of the fact that various stimulants are all the rage as study drugs, I started to investigate and dally with nootropics... with quite mind-blowingly results, no pun intended, as many may already be aware, or at least saw "Limitless" (2011). Anyway, getting to the benzo taper part of the story...
-Obviously a bloodstream full of modafinil, armodafinil, adrafinil, methylphenidate, racetams, noopept, panax ginseng, lion's mane mushroom, L-Tyrosine, NALT, choline supplements, fish oil, light roast coffee, and so on leaves one pretty revved up as the focus and cerebral dexterity turns to anxiety around 3PM assuming one wakes around 6AM as I do. Yoga, GABA, valerian root, chamomile tea, and L-Theanine don't quite cut it for getting calmed down: though, nor do they harm either. What does help is clonazepam. Incidentally it also cured my chronic neck and back pain I've suffered since forever, a big plus when spending 80 hours a week typing and liberated me from my standing desk, which gets pretty tiring. I soon found alprazolam, lorazepam, diazepam, and zolpidem tartrate (Ambien). Also helpful is gabapentin and pregabalin, I would add taurine too. Nitrous oxide makes me noxious and melatonin very irritable, cannabis got the fellow whose desk I took over at work 4 years in prison so that's not an option: ironic, I know.
-This could have gone on semi-indefinitely with a balance between stimulating nootropics and calming GABAergics based around 2 to 4 study/publishing effort sessions per week with three little problems: (a) Alprazolam causes me enuresis, sort of embarrassing since I'm married, though avoidable by only taking alprazolam in the afternoon and never in the evening: this stems from damage to what I surmise is my oberatur inturnus or perhaps levator ani muscle following an endless case of bladder infection and prostatitis leading to a nightmare of pelvic pain disorder lasting a good year: typical medical incompetence... but that is another tangent. (b) Sexual disfunction as all males will know, and disinterest as females too will, this actually benefited marriage by opening up dialogue, strange as that may seem. (c) Burn-like urticaria on my back, and to a lesser degree scalp; this was eventually solved by realizing gabapentin causes edema and the whole adrafinil family causes histamine build up... therefore leading to nasty rashes in tissues with low blood flow: this was solved by backing off the gabapentin and practicing lymphatic massage, plus some stretching and exercise tricks to improve circulation.
-But nothing last forever... except the pandemic, causing me to realize my employment in this Wild West of the world where you can buy or import anything would come to an end and was putting my pulmonary system if not life in danger so I'd end up back in police-state-Anglosphere where no doubt many of you are now if you're reading this. Hence I saw I'd have to stop just about everything given modafinil, clonazepam, pregabalin, and more or less half of my rolling stack being available only through the corrupt and incompetent gatekeepers (doctors) who have a stranglehold on the supply of psychotropic compounds in the Western world. Just try asking your doctor for those three drugs and see what happens... but I digress.
-So this is how I got off benzos: First I read over this forum and other sources, being sure to read the "facts" and the horror stories and skipping the success stories. If you're looking at this, congrats, you're doing better than I did. I then made up an equivalency table and an 8 week tapering schedule, (I calculated a linear taper, not a hyperbolic/exponential/reciprocal curve: sorry, maths is not my forte so I'm not sure the correct name of the curve produced by reducing at 50% per week as per the standard advice). The first week I stabilized at what I'll called "10 base units", which given my irregular pattern of use across various drugs, topping out at, say, 6mg of clonazepam plus 5 or 6mg of alprazolam, 1500mg of pregabalin, 1 gram of phenibut, etc., etc. seemed like a fair place to start and equaled about 5mg of clonazepam, taking 1mg of lorazepam as "base". It worked just fine, but I'd like to add a few unorthodox opinions which do not appear too often on this site or in other sources:
-As we taper, our tolerance increases. Therefore, and sorry to rock the boat, but Ashton is, in my view, wrong on two points: (1) A longer taper prevents acute withdrawal which could lead to relapse, seizure, or prolonged withdrawal syndrome; however, the longer the taper the greater tolerance lessens meaning potency returns, which is obviously not what you want over long continued usage, especially given benzos cause systemic alteration of our body and brain chemistry. Hence I chose 8 weeks: double the standard medical advice, but far less than Ashton.
-(2) Ashton also suggests shifting to longer lasting benzos. Alprazolam isn't more addictive because the onset is faster: all benzos have an onset of 30 to 40 minutes and duration of about 6 hours, its addictiveness is due to the short half-life and elimination from the body: leaving you suddenly at the edge of a cliff. Ashton's suggestion to switch to a longer half-life benzo means the total active drug in the bloodstream little reduces.
-Therefore, between tolerance lessening over a long withdrawal, and switching to a longer half-life benzo, someone trying to taper by Ashton's method is just treading water, and tapering by the standard medical advice risks undue stress leading to relapse or prolonged withdrawal syndrome. Coming to the third point...
-Excepting the odd YouTube video I found, the common advice is not to ease withdrawal symptoms with other substances. I'd say this is poor advice because each having different mechanisms of action, they hence give the body and brain an opportunity to heal the specific pathway and recovery from the drug you want to eliminate: benzos. Speaking for myself personally, I used passion flower, chamomile, valerian root, GABA, L-Tryptophan, 5-HTP, L-Theanine, gabapentin, pregabalin, tianeptine, phenibut, and zolpidem tartrate: the latter two in moderation as I understand they have cross-tolerance with benzodiazepines. I don't drink, but the helpful YouTube videos I found mentioned drinking half a beer; again, there is cross-tolerance so presumably it ought to be used reservedly.
There you have it, three bits of advice that go counter to the prevailing and dominant alternative wisdom on benzo tapering. Like any advice, be it from a doctor, read online, or read just now above, scrutinize it and don't take anyone's say so, knowing any path you choose is a risk. Good luck!
Warm regards,
Success Story
Pardon the "[Trigger Warning]" but I appreciate some people are sensitive even in the mayhem of the world of addiction and my story is in some part contrary to dominant narratives. I'm not sure many will read this: I know I didn't read the success stories when I visited this forum some months back, but instead went straight for the most mortifying and dooming threads, as well as for the "Just the facts Ma'am" sorts. That said, I vowed once before in life I'd revisit a forum, twice actually, if I ever solved the problem prompting my visit and post my success story; and did; so this makes a third. Hope anyone reading can find some solace and know there is hope: if I did it, so can you... there are a few caveats as you will see... anyway, on with the story.
-This was my third time using benzodiazepines. Once when I was 20 and my well meaning but naïve parents suggested I see a psychologist due to not having much direction in life. After going through her inventory she promptly referred my to a psychiatrist, who proceeded to prescribed me a whack of pills. My first stop after the pharmacy was the library, (this being in the days before the 'Net), leading me to quickly discover that excepting clonazepam, the other drugs had quite nasty side-effects so I flushed them and berated the shrink for not forewarning me. What he should have forewarned me about too was the addictive potential of benzos, but fortunately I realized that and that he was a quack after a month: long enough to make a doped-out buffoon of myself and discontinue my appointments with the irresponsible medical "professional", something which is sadly common: you are perhaps reading this now because you too were a victim of such unscrupulous doctors? My second time was short lived, I had been more stressed than usual and asked at a clinic for a script which the doctor promptly wrote me up; nothing worth mentioning came of it being older and wiser by that time.
-The relevant story starts a decade or so later in a land far far away where you can buy any drug you like at the pharmacy without prescription, and if not, order it online, or import it: assuming you can navigate, in a foreign language, custom's myriad of paperwork and corruption. This all started as a curiosity with nootropics, and being a PhD student, in second year by the time, and having being an expatriate long enough to be ignorant of the fact that various stimulants are all the rage as study drugs, I started to investigate and dally with nootropics... with quite mind-blowingly results, no pun intended, as many may already be aware, or at least saw "Limitless" (2011). Anyway, getting to the benzo taper part of the story...
-Obviously a bloodstream full of modafinil, armodafinil, adrafinil, methylphenidate, racetams, noopept, panax ginseng, lion's mane mushroom, L-Tyrosine, NALT, choline supplements, fish oil, light roast coffee, and so on leaves one pretty revved up as the focus and cerebral dexterity turns to anxiety around 3PM assuming one wakes around 6AM as I do. Yoga, GABA, valerian root, chamomile tea, and L-Theanine don't quite cut it for getting calmed down: though, nor do they harm either. What does help is clonazepam. Incidentally it also cured my chronic neck and back pain I've suffered since forever, a big plus when spending 80 hours a week typing and liberated me from my standing desk, which gets pretty tiring. I soon found alprazolam, lorazepam, diazepam, and zolpidem tartrate (Ambien). Also helpful is gabapentin and pregabalin, I would add taurine too. Nitrous oxide makes me noxious and melatonin very irritable, cannabis got the fellow whose desk I took over at work 4 years in prison so that's not an option: ironic, I know.
-This could have gone on semi-indefinitely with a balance between stimulating nootropics and calming GABAergics based around 2 to 4 study/publishing effort sessions per week with three little problems: (a) Alprazolam causes me enuresis, sort of embarrassing since I'm married, though avoidable by only taking alprazolam in the afternoon and never in the evening: this stems from damage to what I surmise is my oberatur inturnus or perhaps levator ani muscle following an endless case of bladder infection and prostatitis leading to a nightmare of pelvic pain disorder lasting a good year: typical medical incompetence... but that is another tangent. (b) Sexual disfunction as all males will know, and disinterest as females too will, this actually benefited marriage by opening up dialogue, strange as that may seem. (c) Burn-like urticaria on my back, and to a lesser degree scalp; this was eventually solved by realizing gabapentin causes edema and the whole adrafinil family causes histamine build up... therefore leading to nasty rashes in tissues with low blood flow: this was solved by backing off the gabapentin and practicing lymphatic massage, plus some stretching and exercise tricks to improve circulation.
-But nothing last forever... except the pandemic, causing me to realize my employment in this Wild West of the world where you can buy or import anything would come to an end and was putting my pulmonary system if not life in danger so I'd end up back in police-state-Anglosphere where no doubt many of you are now if you're reading this. Hence I saw I'd have to stop just about everything given modafinil, clonazepam, pregabalin, and more or less half of my rolling stack being available only through the corrupt and incompetent gatekeepers (doctors) who have a stranglehold on the supply of psychotropic compounds in the Western world. Just try asking your doctor for those three drugs and see what happens... but I digress.
-So this is how I got off benzos: First I read over this forum and other sources, being sure to read the "facts" and the horror stories and skipping the success stories. If you're looking at this, congrats, you're doing better than I did. I then made up an equivalency table and an 8 week tapering schedule, (I calculated a linear taper, not a hyperbolic/exponential/reciprocal curve: sorry, maths is not my forte so I'm not sure the correct name of the curve produced by reducing at 50% per week as per the standard advice). The first week I stabilized at what I'll called "10 base units", which given my irregular pattern of use across various drugs, topping out at, say, 6mg of clonazepam plus 5 or 6mg of alprazolam, 1500mg of pregabalin, 1 gram of phenibut, etc., etc. seemed like a fair place to start and equaled about 5mg of clonazepam, taking 1mg of lorazepam as "base". It worked just fine, but I'd like to add a few unorthodox opinions which do not appear too often on this site or in other sources:
-As we taper, our tolerance increases. Therefore, and sorry to rock the boat, but Ashton is, in my view, wrong on two points: (1) A longer taper prevents acute withdrawal which could lead to relapse, seizure, or prolonged withdrawal syndrome; however, the longer the taper the greater tolerance lessens meaning potency returns, which is obviously not what you want over long continued usage, especially given benzos cause systemic alteration of our body and brain chemistry. Hence I chose 8 weeks: double the standard medical advice, but far less than Ashton.
-(2) Ashton also suggests shifting to longer lasting benzos. Alprazolam isn't more addictive because the onset is faster: all benzos have an onset of 30 to 40 minutes and duration of about 6 hours, its addictiveness is due to the short half-life and elimination from the body: leaving you suddenly at the edge of a cliff. Ashton's suggestion to switch to a longer half-life benzo means the total active drug in the bloodstream little reduces.
-Therefore, between tolerance lessening over a long withdrawal, and switching to a longer half-life benzo, someone trying to taper by Ashton's method is just treading water, and tapering by the standard medical advice risks undue stress leading to relapse or prolonged withdrawal syndrome. Coming to the third point...
-Excepting the odd YouTube video I found, the common advice is not to ease withdrawal symptoms with other substances. I'd say this is poor advice because each having different mechanisms of action, they hence give the body and brain an opportunity to heal the specific pathway and recovery from the drug you want to eliminate: benzos. Speaking for myself personally, I used passion flower, chamomile, valerian root, GABA, L-Tryptophan, 5-HTP, L-Theanine, gabapentin, pregabalin, tianeptine, phenibut, and zolpidem tartrate: the latter two in moderation as I understand they have cross-tolerance with benzodiazepines. I don't drink, but the helpful YouTube videos I found mentioned drinking half a beer; again, there is cross-tolerance so presumably it ought to be used reservedly.
There you have it, three bits of advice that go counter to the prevailing and dominant alternative wisdom on benzo tapering. Like any advice, be it from a doctor, read online, or read just now above, scrutinize it and don't take anyone's say so, knowing any path you choose is a risk. Good luck!
Warm regards,
Success Story
