Is Quitting Heroin As Hard as It Looks?

[chicpoena]

Please don't bicker about spelling.

Heroin withdrawal is analogous to a severe case of the flu and depending on how long and much you use, a lingering feeling of unwellness (PAWS). 8ft-Sativa is right, opiate withdrawal won't kill you like benzo or alcohol withdrawal, but it's up there with the worst of withdrawals.

 

[paranoid android]

^ Not IMO. Heroin is much more physically addictive than those.
I get dillies Rx'd and if I manage to stop for a while I find I can last longer before becoming re physically addicted but H man, 1 shot maybe..2 I'm gone.

To answer the OP...I certainly am finding it so.

Hmm weird i would have thought dilaudid to be more physically addictive given it's short duration. That is the reason i seldom get it prescribed to me anymore even though i find it to be the most euphoric opiate. If i ever try heroin i'll see how it stacks up to the rest. Also i don't inject because i promised a friend of mine i wouldnt start. Still if you eat 1000mg's of morphine a day or snort 50mg's of dilaudid that is still quite abit.

As for people saying that opiate withdrawal won't kill you like benzodiazepine, barbiturate and alcohol withdrawal will you are right. It won't directly kill you though im sure there has been alot of junkies who have killed themselves during withdrawal.

I have gone through alcohol withdrawals and yes id have to say it was worse. I also find alcohol to be much more psychologically addictive and more destructive as well. But thats just me.

All the same heavy opiate withdrawals are enough to make me a suicidal mess. There in early january when i was coming off morphine without any meds for preperation or enough benzos i flipped out and slashed my arm up with a razor blade. Im also a chronic pain patient so the pain comes back with a vengence sometimes.

As for Trainspotting, I didn't even make it past the dirty toliet scene.. that made me want to throw up. I don't think I could handle that whole movie.

Haha i didnt find that bad at all. My brother gagged at that as well lol. If you think it's bad in the movie read the book. The toilet scene is described in much grosser detail.

 

[Miss Hollywood]

Ive quit oxycodone, morphine and dilaudid. I have never tried heroin but i imagine quitting a heavy morphine or dilaudid habit is just as hard as quitting a heroin habit. There is nothing special about heroin really in regards to withdrawal.

In the movie Trainspotting i think that is just Rentons dreams that he is having. Ive read the book (it's a fucking 100 times better by the way) and that dead baby part is a dream of his im pretty sure. This makes sense as ive had truely awful fuckin dreams during heavy opiate withdrawal where ive almost woke up screaming.

It can be brutally hard to quit opiates and ive felt like i was losing my mind during cold turkey withdrawal. But if you do the right preparations and all that it can be done without all that much agony. But like any other drug it's when the sickness goes away that the real battle starts.

Ive never heard of candy before when was it out?

Good post man! But I just wanted to point out that it's the morphine in heroin that is what gets you high. So heroin and morphine are pretty much the same thing except heroin is cut with a bunch of shit and morphine is pure.

Opioid withdrawls are opioid withdrawls. How bad they hit you can vary from person to person as well as how long,how much, and how often you used them for.

If you have a severe opiate habit, like I did where I was using $400 a day worth of heroin for a year, it's not uncommon to hallucinate things when in detox. I did. It was crazy...I kept thinking my friends were next to my bed telling me to "finish the rest of your dope man! it's right on your nitestand!" and of course there was nothing there lol oh, and my stepfather's prized "deer head" collection on the walls of the basement weren't too soothing either! THEY WERE STARING AT ME!!! AHHHH! lol

 

[paranoid android]

Ive never had hallucinations during opiate withdrawals but ive felt paranoid, i get this impending sense of doom and everything looks off. I don't really know how to describe it really but everything looks different. Maybe it's just due to the dilated pupils i don't know.

Also my bipolar goes crazy during opiate withdrawal and i have had really bad mixed states that i guess border on psychosis.

Yup heroin turns into morphine so it is the morphine you are addicted to. Heroin or atleast the pharmaceutical grade stuff is about 2 or 3 times more potent then morphine and is supposed to have a better rush. Ive had morphine IV and it was pretty nice . I liked the pins and needles sensation in my arm and the morphine taking the pain away.

 

[InTherapy82]

Quitting heroin is very difficult. You feel like crap. IT's like a really bad cold combined with stomach flu and then some more. I only made it to day 3 cold turkey. The worst part is that you feel so bad and you know that there is a cure that will fix you instantly within a short drive. I quit using Suboxone cuz otherwise there is no way I'd have the will power to do it. I felt like I had Tabasco sauce in my bloodstream.

Yeah all those movies like Candy, Basketball dairies, Broken are pretty accurate in how hard it is to quit heroin.

From my personal experience heroin is the worst drug to quit after prolonged use. I used morphine for 3 months every day and had no problems quitting. No w/d. Just some increased pain and cravings. Then I using heroin for only a month everyday I already had w/d and stuff. Something about heroin makes it more addictive than other opiates, at least for me. Cuz I know there are people here who have w/d from drugs like vicodin and tramadol.

 

[chucky1432]

Starting heroin is much easier than quitting heroin!!

 

[nukka]

Yeah it is as hard as it looks but many people exaggerate the severity of the W/Ds. It really is hell though don't get me wrong! Going cold turkey off a significant heroin habit is one of the hardest things many people have to go through in their whole life. It gets a lot easier if you have a suboxone taper or at least some prescription meds to help out. Being in a supervised rehab where you can't break down and go score increases you chances of getting clean.

as others have said tho staying clean is a different story and its much harder because when you start feeling physically fine again its easy to convince yourself that using "just once" will be ok... but it never is.

btw out of the opiates I've been on (dilaudid, oc, morphine, methadone), heroin w/ds were the worst and they also come on much faster than anytyhing else

 

[paranoid android]

I wish suboxone was easily available or available at all in the part of canada i live in. Hell even in the parts of canada where you can get it it's just like going to pick up your methadone because you have to take the pill in front on the pharmacist. So really it's just as well to be on methadone since i imagine it's a hell of alot cheaper.

I wish i could get a script for it like you can in the US so i could save it for rainy days when i run out of my regulat opiates. Don't look like that is ever gonna happen though.

 

[eon_blue]

The size of your habit has a lot to do with how bad you'll get sick, obviously. If you're only using, I dunno, one balloon per day as opposed to someone who shoots 1/2 gram in one shot, then you can't expect to go through leo dicaprio 'basketball diaries' type-withdrawals.

I was always a small dose user, always afraid of letting my tolerance climb too high. At my peak, I was using a balloon per day to stay well which is roughly 1/5 of a gram. Whenever I would get sick it would be absolute hell for me, relatively speaking...I'm sure if I knew what it felt like to go cold turkey off of a gram a day habit then I wouldn't be complaining.

As far as quitting and STAYING off of dope is concerned, well that's a weird one for me. When I got sober last April, I was able to stay off dope for 8 months before jumping back into it...I never craved it once until one day it just fucking hit me like a sack of bricks when I was 8 months clean. Still trying to figure out how to fucking get those cravings to go back to wherever they were hiding before though

 

[xxkcxx]

Maybe someone can describe the symptoms with more detail. . . . I never got into Opiates.

Since I have gone through H wds many times, I would be happy to.

v sweating like you are breaking a fever
v nausea and vomiting
v the above at the same time as diarrhea
v goose flesh
v chills
v achey muscles, joints and bones
v restlessness (sort of like restless leg syndrome, but over your entire body)
v insomnia
v runny nose
v cough (usual with mucus production)
v shortness of breath
V anxiety
v general feeling of sadness/depression
V high blood pressure
v yawning
v watery eyes
v "the kicks" which are muscle spasms in the legs


Wds only last at the most a week, and the worst symptoms are over in 3 days. If you take a drug like suboxone, you really don't get any wd symptoms at all.

As someone else mentioned, the hardest part of quitting is trying to cope in the world without the crutch that was your DOC.

 

[oldhead]

i just saw that movie Candy last night, and the scene that depicts their withdrawal is pretty accurate. That movie is crazy. It's so intense, especially the scene when she had to deliver the miscarriage. That almost made me cry! Anyway, kicking strong opiates looks pretty similar to that. It is definitely one the worst things I've ever been through. If anyone gets a chance, they should definitely check out that movie.

I thought whats his name who starred in the movie, Ray did a good job of how kicking is. Ray Charles was a blind junkie. Pretty interesting.

 

[belfort]

kicking heroin is pretty miserable..i never knew such a nasty feeling existed until i ran out of dope when i had a $200/day habit...uggh...it started out with a runny nose, yawning constantly, a light sweat on my back...mild cold feeling then you would get too warm, mild restlessness...then when you have been 20 plus hours clean from the dope thats when the nasty shit kicks in...everything and i mean every thing will TASTE and SMELL bad...i was only able to sip fruit juice when i would get really dopesick...i would lay in bed, with a headache and my back killing me....i would be completely exhausted, too tired to go downstairs to take a piss so i pissed into an empty milk gallon ..thing is, you are exhausted but when you lay dpown you are so restless, your legs cant relax and you lay there basically constantly kicking your legs, and it irritates you so much you have to get up and walk around but within seconds you crash back down onto your bed from tiredness...your stomach balls up in knots, you puke if you have anything in your stomach....you are watching tv and see people smiling and you have no idea what could make them so happy as you are completely unable to smile or be content whatsoever...you have 1 thing on your mind, getting dope and you are a man on a mission..oh yeah, there is such a thing as 'dope time', that is where you count the minutes on a clock, and they go by so slowly...a minute seems like 2 hours, the longer you wait, the more you agonize over it...oh yeah, SLEEP is an impossibility as well, dont even attempt it as it aint gonna happen unless you have a handful of benzos..if you close your eyes you have basically what i call 'waking nightmares'..you think of the strangest and bizarre ideas and they haunt you...this will last for 3-5 days and then after that you will still suffer from depression, lack of energy, insomnia and general lack of ability to enjoy ANYTHING....these later symptoms could last for weeks, months or even years!!!

thats why kicking heroin is so much fun and why even after you have kicked it, you still might be in a trap that doesnt have a ready solution...

 

[ThaiDie4]

Wow. I just want to say after reading all these comment that I admire anyone who has kicked a heroin habit. Like, for real, sorry if that sounds weird. but I couldn't imagine that. I thought quitting smoking (cigs) was hard..

 

[-Guido-]

Heroin is a bitch to quit. Even after you get over the withdrawals.

 

[pkt]

no

it's harder....

things like drug withdrawal are always exaggerated in movies because its impossible to capture the real physical and mental intensity on camera and that's why they always make it out like their hallucinating and shit like on Trainspotting because anyone looking at you going through withdrawals wouldn't be able to imagine how half the shit your going through.....

in a way your question is sort of like asking "Is it hard to climb mount everest?"

Yes it's hard but some people find it harder than others....

 

[paranoid android]

KC pretty much said it with the withdrawal symptoms. For anyone who says morphine ain't hard to come off take 1 gram a day for a long time then quit cold turkey. I was stupid enough to do this once and i was rolling around on the floor in agony. Like litterally rolling on the floor in agony because there was no position that was comfortable and my nerves felt on fire.

For anyone who get's the RLS real bad during withdrawal i suggest you get some gabapentin or lyrica. The shit works wonders for RLS especially combined with a benzo.

 

[toolfan420]

yes, it is hard.

I'd say it is a LOT harder than it looks in those movies..

 

[Staj]

Don't admire us, we did it to ourselves, you should say how stupid we are.

 

[boxcut3]

quitting heroin is miserable. it won't kill you or anything but it sure feels like it will. the only thing i can relate it to is that when i start WDing I feel like how someone who is starving to death probably feels. it's like such a need at that point that you feel like you physically will die without it. of course that's not the case, but it certainly feels that way. i can't think of a worse experience than detoxing. i will never go cold turkey again, even with a high dose of Suboxone i get really weak and uncomfortable for a few days when I'm detoxing. So yea, I would say the movies do a pretty accurate visual representation of detoxing.

 

[ThaiDie4]

Don't admire us, we did it to ourselves, you should say how stupid we are.

I don't think that. I got addicted to smoking cigerettes... addiction is addiction, no one is perfect. I couldn't fault a person for doing the same thing I did with a different substance.

I think anyone who can turn their life around deserves a pat on the back. It's easier just to stay on the ground where you are and not pick yourself up, but those who choose to better themselves are doing a great thing. Not just with heroin, with any drug, alcohol, food addiction, self-mutilation, stealing, etc. any addiction that is broken is a job well done in my book.