Opioids Dihydrocodeine first time dosage advice

[Dimitrius2912]

Hello,

This weekend will be my first experience with dihydrocodeine (Paramol CWE). The reason for this post is I'm unsure how much to dose. Having read around it seems that dihydrocodeine is 1.5 - 2 times stronger than codeine. Over the past 5 months I've been dosing 256mg of codeine (Co-codamol CWE) never more than once a fortnight. The effects tend to last 1 - 1.5 hours and have never felt overwhelming. My only other opiate experiences have been with Tramadol (3 x 50mg tablets consumed over about 5 hours). The last Tramadol experience was 2 weeks ago and I didn't notice any tolerance as a result of the codeine I've been consuming.

Can anyone tell me if the above would mean I'm "opiate naive"? My intention was to take 180mg of dihydrocodeine, but from what I've read, this is considerably more than the recommended dose for somebody who is opiate naive.

I also have Oramorph and Buprenorphine, but want to experience the "weaker" opiates first, to gauge if I want to try anything stronger.

 

[Rybee]

Yes you are opiate naive. I'm surprised you say that 250mg of Codeine doesn't do much for you. For somebody who is opiate naive, I'd expect them to really feel that.

Yeah I think you're right - I too would go for maybe 150-180mg for a starting dose, it's probably equivalent to 280-320mg and 3480-380mg Codeine respectively.

Personally, I'd also plug it too, you get a much better rush from it than oral ingestion.

 

[phatass]

depends on your weight, body mass, and also different people metabolize more or less effectively codeine, on avrage 10% of your codeine dose is metabolized into morpine, then main thing that gets you high with codeine (it might be te same with DHC).
180mg DHC doesn't seem too much for a first time IMO, you've tried codeine, so it's not you'r first opiate experience...

But why do you have buprnorphine? it's hugely potent, and not very recreational at all!

edit: indeed the BA is igher when pluggd, and there is a fater come-up than oral from what i've hard, i don't know if "rush" is the right word though...

Also you can add 25-50mg promethazine if you want (it's otc in th UK yeah?) it will potentiate the "nod", hydroxyzine (atarax) is a good potentiator too, but ha to b prescribd i believe. HOWEVER if you potntiate, you can decrease your codeine, DHC or morphine dosages.

Also, ask yourself if you really want to get into harder opiates, it often doesn't end well...

 

[Dimitrius2912]

Thanks for the advice, I was pretty sure I was opiate naive, but wanted to verify this.

I think I'll save the potentiators for a later date as this will be my first experience with DHC. Also when I CWE codeine I use around 150ml of water, my intention was to use about the same for the DHC. If I was to plug, which I probably won't as this is my first time, that seems like an awful lot of liquid to squirt up my butt!

 

[Rybee]

Thanks for the advice, I was pretty sure I was opiate naive, but wanted to verify this.

I think I'll save the potentiators for a later date as this will be my first experience with DHC. Also when I CWE codeine I use around 150ml of water, my intention was to use about the same for the DHC. If I was to plug, which I probably won't as this is my first time, that seems like an awful lot of liquid to squirt up my butt!

Sorry - I only ever used 30mg DHC tablets for plugging, never CWE.