100% yes, although I never used them daily - at least, not for extended periods, USUALLY not simultaneously. My opiate of choice was kratom so, perhaps, a minor one, however I'm still convinced my existing problems began to fall off a sharp cliff once I began using kratom and became addicted to it a few times. I believe I first tried kratom in 2019 ish... initially I had few issues, would go through a 50 gram bag or so for a week and not notice much different when I stopped. By 2020, I was beginning to notice negatives from overuse, feeling like shit waking up in the morning, etc... coincidentally, perhaps not so helpfully, although, honestly, in retrospect I had a pretty chilled year it was the beginning of the first COVID lockdowns, I went from working from home pretty often to ALL the time, I had a lot of shit to do, and where kratom used to be motivating I now found it motivated me mainly to sit around watching TV shows endlessly. When I'd start to feel stressed about my apparently invisible handcuffs that bound me and kept me from the shit I really could have been doing - and for which that year was, in some ways, a golden opportunity - I'd read it as a kratom rebound moreso than a building psychological pressure to actually apply myself to the kind of tasks that were actually important to my life. By the end of 2020, I'd been fully addicted to and gone through full blown withdrawals at least twice, the second time culminating in about 60 days of absolute sobriety where I even went to some goddamn zoom AA type meetings, swallowing my pride even though I do think that whole movement is a sadly dysfunctional cult which persists moreso because of it's lack of catastrophic failings that can't just be ascribed to substance issues moreso than any real benefit in the program. But I digress...
Dissociatives, I used more sparingly, but despite my best efforts I wouldn't be surprised if over a 3 or 4 year period... I'd used maybe at least a gram of ketamine, on average, every 2 or 3 weeks. This is interspersed with periods of heavier usage when I had time off, as my permatolerance grew, and accumulating stress from seemingly going nowhere in improving my life and an increasing inability to actually make myself DO ANYTHING or even WANT to do anything except continue to binge on ketamine (I also did a bunch of other dissociatives during this period, but ketamine was and remains my Disso of choice, despite it's many shortcomings).
Complicating things further was the fact that I was using both modafinil and phenibut on and off during weekdays in an effort to just squeeze some goddamn productivity out of myself. This worked, maybe for a few years with diminishing returns. Eventually, as you might imagine - it was no longer enough to curb my rapidly cratering ability to take executive action in any area of my life without, basically... at least a week or 2 just lying around doing fuck all, and I mean fuck all, mostly lying on a sofa with my phone in my hand or staring catatonically at a show on a laptop - followed by some heavy doses - well, 150mg armoda, phenibut maybe, 1g-2g, tianeptine sulphate, ~40mg ish as needed. I forgot about that, I guess tianeptine counts as an opiate too. Actually tianeptine I credit with keeping me going longer than I reasonably should have been able to - but anyway, this polypharmaceutical self-medication would at best give me a few days of hard work followed by a crash where I was, again, useless, unmotivated, unable to even care about that fact but continuously agonising over how little I was getting done, nonetheless.
Fortunately modafinil, phenibut, tianeptine - in reasonable doses - and, honestly, I really never had any desire to increase the dose in years of use - are fairly forgiving substances. But combined with the slightly too frequent opiate and dissociative use to chill out, being artificially and unproductively wired but looking kinda busy through the week - I mean, I do not think I was doing myself any favours.
Beginning of 2021 following maybe 4-5 months of total sobriety I was put on an SSRI for Generalised Anxiety Disorder - sertraline. The diagnosis, I think was accurate - but not the whole picture. It maybe did something but did nothing to quell my now constant feelings of overwhelm, disinterest in doing anything to improve my life, and shortly after I thought, fuck this, and started using ketamine again occasionally. Finding that modafinil and phenibut were no longer doing the job, I "upgraded" to straight amphetamine and clonazepam/diazepam, in alternating cycles just to keep functioning which essentially abandoning sertraline after maybe a couple of months. I was not able to use speed consistently without a painfully obvious feeling that it was really gonna fuck up my brain, but I did develop a fairly low key clonazepam addiction which waxed and waned but took maybe 8 months to kick entirely.
Throughout this - while drugs were probably an unhelpful factor - I maintain that I was just doing what I needed to do to survive. I was in an extremely stressful job with a lot of responsibility which didn't always mean a large workload, although if I'd been more with it, I could for sure have taken on more work and made myself more useful than I did. I most ended up doing the bare minimum for months at a time interspersed with a few weeks of high intensity busywork to burnout - unfortunately not the way to actually finish anything properly, but somehow, enough - these periods inevitably would be the ones following periods of abstinence when I would just be like christ... I guess my brain is permanently broken.
Right now - actually since the beginning of this year - I'm now unemployed, have close to zero true responsibilities, set my own schedule, and yet I have not yet got over the constant feeling that I should be doing MORE, no matter what it is I'm doing. The net effect is that I'm mostly doing nothing but I try to take comfort in the fact that I am obviously, doing SOME things, if very slowly... this is just time I need to heal.
I've also been diagnosed with adult onset ADHD - I was as honest with my prescribing doctor as I felt was prudent, which is to say, I did not lie, but neither did I elaborate as I have done here to the full extent of my attempts at self medication. I've been prescribed ritalin / methylphenidate, both the IR and XR versions - they helped, SOMEWHAT - but ultimately just give me more physical energy but have close to zero impact on my "cognitive energy" which is close to nonexistent, I'd say, 70% of the days. I'm about to be prescribed lisdexamphetamine instead - I am, honestly, looking forward to this - amphetamines do make me functional - to an extent, despite my many mistakes - I know my own mind, by now. However, I am not expecting miracles. I've come to realise that there is simply no purely pharmacological intervention to undo the situation I've got myself into, and am thus receiving therapy to augment the impact of the medication. Basic stuff - write a list in the morning of a few things to do that day - not too much! Try to do them. Rinse, repeat. Every time I get into some kind of light mania from feeling that I'm finally getting myself back on track, the result is the same - a few days of intense focus on a multitude of projects, then a week to recover where I just don't even have the inclination to do much except get out of bed and wrestle with my intrusive thoughts about how much of my life I'm wasting, what a lazy, useless waste of space I am, etc... maybe you know the drill.
On that note - I don't expect that medication is going to be a panacea which solves all my problems. I need to keep trying at the nonpharmacological routes. BUT, I do want that prescription and official diagnosis because in my country it is EXTREMELY difficult to get prescribed a prescription stimulant, most people think ADHD is just laziness, as far as I can tell. I mean, they're progressive enough not to say it - but if it hasn't affected them in such an intense way - my impression is that they think it. Most of my family for example have been very skeptical of my efforts to get my condition recognised, although they are, again, kind enough to mostly keep their thoughts to themselves - even as they directly witness my obvious despondency, apathy, and endless frustration, I think there's a part of them that still thinks I just don't try hard enough - or - I love this one - "I just haven't found something that interests me yet!" - well, no shit. Nothing interests me, really.
I have no doubt that my condition is at least partly drug induced, however it's also stress induced, and my drug use was a survival mechanism in response to that stress. As far as I'm concerned, whatever the origin, the result is the same - and some drugs do help, but rather than relying on illicitly acquired shit while I work through my issues and all the potential need to hide my usage, stigma, uncertain purity, etc, I'd prefer to be in the system, with access to pharmaceutical grade dopamine agonists and professionals who actually do appear to acknowledge that my situation is possibly not something I'm going to get out of without help on a few fronts - both pharmacological and therapeutic, and of course whatever will I can muster on my part to keep trying to do things I know are good for me...
Damn, sorry, didn't mean to give you my life story almost, but I guess I had a lot to say about this topic.
