• 🇬🇧󠁿 🇸🇪 🇿🇦 🇮🇪 🇬🇭 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
    European & African
    Drug Discussion

    Welcome Guest!
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
  • EADD Moderators: Shambles

EADDs - Heroin the great debate

BlindHelperMonkey said:
has anyone ever discovered the reason why, it takes a month or so of daily usage to get your innaugural habit, yet you can be clean for years.. have a couple day binge - and be rattling like a good'un the next morning.. muscle memory or something?
Click to expand...

This is something i think about a lot myself and i think i may have an answer to the question, partially atleast.

Leaving the muscle memory aspect to one side for now, tolerance to a drug happens both in your liver and your brain. Upon repeated encounters with opiate molecules by the enzymes in your liver, your liver simply produces more enzymes. This has nothing to do with withdrawal but what it does do is make you need to take more of the drug to get high, which ultimately leads to increasing amounts of the drug in your brain. This is the key part as your brain is where the high takes place and also where withdrawals are produced from. Now withdrawal symptoms feel very much like
an opposite effect of the high, and this is due to a really simple mechanism called downregulation. Your opiate receptors in your brain simply reduce in number. Incidently, this is a form of homeostasis, where your body knows what it ought tkexperience naturally and when faced with an unnatural situation (ie.shitload more opiate molecules bound to its receptors than it has experienced at any other time during the previous 20 years your life.) it does what it can in order to make things how they were before. So basically, daily drug users have fewer opiate receptors than non opiate users. The trouble is that as soon as you stop taking the drug, yourbrain now has too few opiod receptors to deal with your natural opioid levels. This is what it means to withdraw from a drug, and the 2 to four days that this lasts for is the time it takez for your brain to build new opiod receptors to get you back up to the level you were before.Yor cells each literally have to go into the nucleus, make a copy of the opiod receptor blueprint in your dna take this off to a ribozome to be manufactured etc...

As for the muscle memory side i can only speculate so i'll leave for now as i'm sure some of the other guys would dp a much better job.
 
Last edited:
^^ no, that in fact sounds far more plausible than muscle memory. definitely has the whiff of a phenomenological process, but as i mentioned before.. with so much psychology involved in addiction per se - who can be sure?


if youre correct, i guess the question would follow - is there anything one could do to help the body along, as it were. par example, when in my rave days.. we regularly took 5-HTP supplements pre and post as a precursor building-block to serotonin formation in the brain. whether this had any objective effect or not im not sure, but would there be any similar steps one could take with regards to opiate receptors or just generally lessening the physiological response you describe
 
For me, i use variation in routine as a tool to stave off tolerance. I rotate my drugs so that the same set of neurons doesn't get used continuously for too long in a row and my liver doesn't get as much advance notice as to what's about to come its way so it can't really justify overproducing lots of extra enzymes which it wont need (making enzymes is expensive, in energy terms). I think being unpredictable is very important.
 
There's comedowns and comedowns, pontifex. With heroin, the psychological effects complicate everything and make for an enormous gulf between subjective and observer perceptions. My first withdrawal came after 9 months of tri-weekly and two of daily use of the old 'Chinese rocks' . I didn't sleep for 3 nights and felt like death. Yet my vital signs were fine and, apart from a bit of vomiting and my ceaseless moaning, there was nothing to alarm an outside observer. Quite what happens to the mind during heroin detoxification is mystery about which only junkies have the faintest idea.

Perhaps today's yoof have gone soft or something but ideas of what's bearable seem to have changed somewhat. With today's purity levels, it'd take considerable time and determination to grow addicted enough for a man-size comedown, when green gunge oozes from every orifice, you rub the hairs off your legs with your twitching, vomit up bits of stomach lining and, as final indignity, men jism whenever they scratch above the knee. Woowee, doesn't bear thinking about but previous addict generations went through such turkeys as a matter of course on arrival in gaol. Now, they dish out methadone with the cocoa and wonder why prisons are overcrowded. Oh, for the good ol' days, when men was men, junkies had proper habits and goodlooking sheep ran scared...
 
Shit i knew you must be a writer or something. I am not in the habit of checking out peoples profiles too much, mainly because i prefer to just coverse equally with everyone and not get biased by how many or posts they have etc, but i literally just used the hyperlink specifically to see if you were a writer and there it was. I like it when stuff like that happens as its usually the other way round. You spend hours at the tail end of a crack binge scrabbling around for invisible drugs that you know are there, yet more often than not you somehow wind up empty handed.
 
pinkpapaver said:
addiction is complicated.
Click to expand...

And specific to the individual. Treatments based on a generic formula will never be as effective as those tailored to suit the individual. Just my two penneth FWIW.
 
Last edited:
^^ indeed pp, i for one have issues of weight (i used to be fat and am terrified of returning thus), depression, routine, social-conditioning, neuropsychological pleasure/reward damage, boredom and a slight but unhealthy fixation with needles - all tied into my addiction. i dont think simple cardboard cut out rehab is going to work for me, but i live in hope etc
 
Was not sure were to post this, and remembered this thread existed.

This is a documentary, mainstream Greek tv, criticizing the stance the Ministry of Health has on methadone scripts. To get on a script, you have to wait 4 - 5 YEARS!!!!!!!!! And no taking methadone home either, dosing at the clinic.

Had no idea it was so difficult for the addicts in Athens. For those on a script in the UK, how would you cope? I think this is probably why there is no concept of a functional heroin user here.

I don't know if there are subtitles in English for these, but here are the links anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-xU4ZwyWXY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxC0mOoQwBc&feature=relmfu

What is heartbreaking, is some areas of downtown Athens which have been over-run by junkies - Nigerian dealers. Austerity austerity austerity...
 
you have to remember that your mind is the most powerful thing on earth... no drug can be more powerful than your mind and control you (as it said in the adverts, i sucked it all up) i've not taken lsd or mushrooms or anything, but from what i gather the user is sensible enough to know it's not real real, so you control the drug, becauses your mind is powerful..the thing is heroin users have been convinced somewhere along the line that they have to have it otherwise something very bad is going to happen (the rattle). to a functioning addict - i supposeto any addict it is a very scary thought. i get terrified about rattling at work, not being able to get things done for illness. i

in reality it is not all that bad, but because i know i can cure it very easily i do. it's hard work being on diamorphine from the streets... would be nice to know what it would be like to get it at the chemists.

more to say but my eyes are dropping
 
charlie clean said:
That's true, Iseme. Another person with a different make-up could take exactly the same amount and convince themselves they're 'clucking' and dire things will happen unless they get another hit soon. So, while you're gardening, they're out scoring and, like all good self-fulfilling prophecies, getting authentically addicted. It takes at least 9 months of pretty determined use to develop a physical habit and, if you leave it 72 hours between doses often enough so you can leave it 72 hours, even then you avoid actual dependency. Certainly in the early stages, 'addiction' is psychological and you can argue it's mainly those with an 'addictive personality' who wind up strung out.
Click to expand...

Skipped the rest of the thread so apologies for any repetition...

I agree tho.

Addiction is a strange beast. Know folks on scripted opies (morphine, oxy, fent) at high doses for years that don't consider themselves "addicts" who take enough poppy-product to drop the proverbial elephant on a daily basis but suffer waaaaaaaay less than I do after just a few days binging on similar. Still not convinced it really is "all in the head" tho... or maybe it is? Dunno.

I do know that it took me several months of habitual use of strong opies before I experienced me first proper cluck. An I also know that it took less and less use for more and more cluck each time since. Nowadays just a few days on strong opies has me clucking me nads off for a week following. Tis a pisser :\

Young fella I know has just started getting into oxy and has yet to experience his first cluck. Tis one of those things that ya just can't warn most folks about so have said me piece and leave it in the lap of the poppygods. Kinda heartbreaking knowing how these things tend to end up tho :\

My personal theory is that it takes a combination of strong opies/extended use/sudden change in circumstance for the worse to hit true addiction. Mixture of psychological, physical and circumstantial stuffs to bite hard. Once bitten tis generally a bitch for some considerable time to come tho. Probly forever in one form or another, I'd say. Not sure any one - or even two - of that unholy triumverate of circumstance would really scupper ya tho. All three and expect to be truly fuxxorred for a while, mind :D
 
I skipped the posts as like some on here my view is from 1st hand knowledge.

it's 1 of the best drugs I have ever done. On my 1st try I hated it & nearly burned my flat down and was also sick for nearly 24 hours.

I will keep it short but Heroin has been my best freind yet also my biggest enemy. Though I am "clean" now (well I don't have a habit but still use) I still feel it's power to draw you in if your not carefull. I have seen many great people die or wreck there life with this drug but it's the best high out there.

I really think you can't judge Heroin's effects untill you I.V. it in my view, a good shot of heroin is far better than smoking a whole bag & the feeling is like being wrapped in warm silk, I love the drug.

I would make it legal like it was in the UK during the 1960's tbh but too many people make way too much cash from the illegal trade.

Thats my 2 pence worth on the subject anyway.
 
It was never legal in the 1960's, it was back in 1914 or thereabouts that it becaome illegal - correct me if I'm wrong. Your doc could prescribe it but, with a license, they still can ey?

But yeah I agree, I'd make it legal to posess and definitely have it far more available as an option for pain and addiction. I've given it right up mainly because of the kinds of people and situations I was finding myself in and also cause I hate to be a slave to guy/girl whose ain aim is making money. My health means fuck all to them. Put it in the hands of the medics and then I'll be interested.
 
Seems the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act made manufacture, supply and posession properly criminal offences, though there'd been the 1912 International Opium Convention aiming at control of opium and morphine internationally, and the 1916 Defence Of The Realm Act aimed at preventing heroin and cocaine addiction among the armed forces by bringing heroin supply under Home Office control.

The 'British System' of prescribing to addicts goes back to the 1926 Rolleston Report which gave doctors the authority to dispense heroin within limits, the authority could be withdrawn. Prescribing under the British System maintained the small number of known addicts, mostly middle class, quite often doctors, people deemed to be worthy of it and inclined towards compliance till 1968 when it mostly came to an end, though doctors could still be licenced to supply it by the Home Office even after that, just the Home Office wasn't all that inclined to issue the licences.

Something of a rebirth of diamorphine prescribing under the last Govt at least. With the setting up of the National Treatment Agency in 2001 and the publication of the 2002 Updated Drugs Strategy the last Govt made explicit provision for an expansion of diamorphine prescribing where the most suitable option. I'm not sure if this has panned out in quite the way intended under the latest Govt or what the availability is like these day? TBH I haven't kept up with it, long time since I've moved in those circles, thank G*d.
 
You're about as likely to receive a new diamorphine script today as you are to score 100% gear from that pubertal shotter on the corner. Cynics will tell you the only constant concern of the NTA is the perpetuation of its own existence. But a self serving expediency is the overriding principle of most of Treatment's vested interests; it's turned into one big gravy train and the only people not to benefit are, of course, the poor, downtrodden addicts who make it all possible. They're just expected to compensate for their miserable existence by doing what they're told and help their betters make money. Way of the modern world, I suppose, but the situation sucks no less for that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top