Heroin Long-term heroin realities, and strategies for prolonging maximal benefits?

[seeking.salvation]

Hello bluelighters,

Firstly, I'd like to preemptively apologize for the relevant research I have not already done myself in seeking answers to these questions. While I have only this token gesture of acknowledgement to offer as mitigation it's not being done without the recognition of time & effort expended by anyone who may reply: beyond what shame is inherent to finding myself more often than not an increasingly unfit self-advocate, as someone who's otherwise been primarily on the other side of support solicitations, I'm not unaware of how I might be perceived as a lowly "help vampire". To those possibly swayed by such an assumption I can only express my sincerest gratitude for considering otherwise. That I've become so incapable of even this, something however nuanced in it's misleadingly straightforward simplicity I could hardly have an otherwise better background to excel at, has been an immeasurably disheartening realization. This is not to say I expect to remain this way in perpetuity, and fully intend to further this effort on my own when fleeting moments such as this should become less few & far between, but it's upsetting to linger here mentally immobilized making no relevant progress now all the same.

With that said, any personal anecdotes, clarification regarding common misconceptions, simple suggestions which may help guide me toward any substantial truths, would be greatly appreciated in potentially sparing me from some amount of the requisite demands I'll face while following-up on this entirely myself when next I'm able to do so.


So... I've seemed to reach a crossroads in life forcing me to reckon with having lost even that which is required to merely entertain the idea, however improbable, of my somehow attaining a state of being remotely worth prolonging via means otherwise seen as sustainable, or with only tradeoffs commonly deemed acceptable. Were it not for the results of semi-random chance granting me this alternative choice I see little reason to doubt I'd have gone along with my intentions of peacefully drifting off into oblivion courtesy of the tiny procurement made specifically for this purpose. Circumstances are such that my qualms with the idea of fully committing to a presumed reliance on doomed means in exchange of a long time for a "good time" are trivially reasoned away. Although it must surely come off as juvenile I am not, I've already lived for what I'd consider a rather "long-time" and it's has been a near universally negative experience the entire time. I've gone through the proverbial ringer on numerous occasions and subsequently scraped at all I could to avoid this outcome until bloody stumps are all that remained from doing so, it's only in losing what feels like any remaining semblance of plausible deniability things could be otherwise I'm able to find peace with this conclusion. I may, in some more relevant thread, expand on these issues further but given how people might be inclined to respond here this seemed worth a partial explanation; though what I'm not saying is "my experience is objectively worse than anyone who's chosen otherwise" specifically with regard to those who've gone down such a path in some sense only to return and express that having done so was worthwhile. Approaching something resembling an adequate response to this is non-trivial so I wish only to leave my thoughts on that here by noting common sentiments found in replies on relevant topics often implicitly suggesting, probably not intentionally, that every individual's suicide or rejection in some capacity of establish dogma for lack of a tolerable experience had been an objective mistake is founded in quite a few assumptions.

My specifically relevant questions are as follows, and I'd imagine not especially surprising:

1. What do the actual prospects of long-term heroin dependency look like, in particular when assuming a safe & steady supply without IV usage? Is it inevitable that without accounting at all for tolerance I will hit a ceiling of utility despite an increasing dosage where any benefits become negligible, non-existent, or increasingly outweighed by peripheral effects warranting their own solutions? If your answer is yes, is that a personal anecdote, can anyone vouch for this being corroborated by historical data from places/periods when greater availability better supported such use, and is this similarly affirmed in pertinent research results regarding those individuals whom via one government program or another have been guaranteed a roughly equivalent opportunity?
2. Assuming that, to preserve practicality if nothing else, what actual methodologies exist for mitigating the aforementioned concerns? I've seen "ULDN" brought up in relevant discussions, there's of course the hype surrounding that new RC's (SR-17018) potential relevancy here, you can apparently enhance potency via the (MAOI?) actions of whatever is in grapefruit juice, but is there more to consider? If some strategy as truly effective in mitigating these issues existed it would seemingly be far more widely known about than my occasional run-ins with such topics would suggest though, right?
3. Were the only viable approach to this instead rather lie in a rotation of different substances what might this actually look like in practice, possible candidate substances permitting similar enough benefits to be considered. proposed schedules?

Another more tangentially relevant question:

1. Despite reading what I've written above, and in the additional clarification below, do you believe there are alternatives I should be sure to have already experienced/considered? Regardless of my own government's proclivity for hollow displays of compassion, and it's questionably sadistic actuality in their supporting of MAT patients, this is *an* option. Disregarding the apparently incomparable discontinuation woes inherent to, theoretically ideal, substances with long half-lifes like methadone I can't help but presume it's inability to offer me what I'm actually looking for in an opi(ate/oid). Personally I've done morphine a number of times in more recent history and I "hated" it by comparison, it wasn't anything like a high-purity H. Aside from being closer to the opposite of conducive to productivity those experiences also happened, perhaps by mere chance, to coincide with a bout of inexplicable memory loss where I just couldn't recall a password I needed to enter on a near daily basis for multiple days afterward. I can't imagine even considering this if all I could choose was morphine is what I'm trying to say, though it's hardly improbable they did more to make that oral morphine solution anything other than vaguely appreciable beyond just it's punishingly disgusting taste; nice to think that this final "fuck you" is what awaits even those dying in hospice care, surreal. Maybe in combination with some amount of amphetamine things could even out in some capacity, but I can't imagine what we're so selflessly blessing those on MAT with is liable to be any better.

To further clarify, I'm writing this as someone who is not currently dependent on any particular drug, save for nicotine, who's reason for settling on H to serve this purpose is that it proved to be the only sufficiently capable tool in mitigating my various mind maladies such that it permitted me do anything like actually living rather than being condemned to merely enduring life as this mental prisoner of circumstance. When I initially tried H some years ago the intent was equivalent to what this last purchase was, and honestly wouldn't shock me to learn it had ironically been the only reason I didn't go through with it back then. What it gave me was a cushion from the impact of grim realities I cannot change, a stable baseline I could function with to change the things I reasonably can, to experience myself unhindered by the demiurge's choice impositions of dark comedy and share that with those close to me. It's hard not to see even those decisions made previously to "go along with" allowing myself to run out on two separate occasions as something founded in the misguided hopes born of refreshed memories of how a tolerable life could be, but really can't, propelling me through another year long foray into various self-improvement practices as though my doing so did anymore than grant me another view of that increasingly well-defined ceiling of potential I've hit time after time. I'd rather not burden this message with so much questionably warranted meanderings through contextual information and leave it here. If you happened to get this far you have my thanks, hopefully it wasn't so tedious.

 

[danosaurous22]

To me it is a law similar to "you get what you pay for": in that case, you will often play mind games to convince yourself that you are really getting a deal, or believe an enthusiastic and reputed seller or buyer. But if you look through this forum for posts about chipping, getting back into or trying heroin, and especially posts where people are hooked for life, convincing yourself that you will be able to control it the extent that you'll get more out of life than you would suffering general mental anguish sober, you will find that the vast majority of posters with experience in this, often times decades, will tell you to stay clear away if you don't want to eventually suffer even more than you do now. This kind of goes without saying, but my mind will jump to mountain sized conclusions when it comes to drugs to cope with life. I am in the thick of it with another drug right now, and once you begin to circle the drain and use above your means you start to drag others down with you and the drug doesn't feel like a relief from life but more a relief from a life without the drug. In practice though I still hold out hope for responsible drug use to self medicate, but prove myself wrong time and time again and each time I fall it's just deeper and deeper into apathy. I've seen personalities and my own personality just change radically and I hadn't even thought about it while it was happening, just compared myself to who I was a couple years ago and it's certainly a hard life that makes it even harder to relate to people even though that's part of why I became so interested in drugs (escaping society and finding peace and happiness by myself). I still feel like I have learned a lot about life from abusing drugs, but you basically double down on not fitting in. Squares don't get you and you don't get squares, there was a time when I understood why people might follow all the rules and now I've done things that I never would've imagined I'd do for drugs and for the experience, not necessarily proud of it but I feel like it gives you the impression of living an intense and romantic lifestyle where you kind of float above all the bullshit and see it for what it is. From the outside it looks a lot different though, and you will disappoint and confuse good people in your life who care about you if you get addicted to a hard drug, guaranteed. As dumb as it sounds to me right now, I almost want to recommend immersing yourself in intellectual shit from the past, books and research and history and art. When I was a child and a teenager and feeling some kind of mental anguish or wanting out of this life, I had a brief period where gaining the perspectives of geniuses from the past would distract me and give me something to chew on for long periods of time, and a lot of it is definitely grim and not a glowing review of humanity and our understanding of the world. But knowing that these people from centuries ago thought the same things and were also outcasts who had outlets to blow of steam always gave me some hope that a clear head can get a lot out of this life, even if it's mostly noticing how terrible everything is. LSD and ketamine would always reinforce my belief in knowledge as a painkiller for living in such a stupid and evil world, even if just for a couple weeks. I know this is not really relevant to your question totally, I just really appreciated how thorough your post was and wanted to give you the same warning you've heard countless times before partially because I need to hear it myself.

 

[the_ketaman]

The only way I've managed to continue using heroin after 19 years and keep a relatively low tolerance is to swap from Suboxone to heroin interchangeably which is incredibly difficult.
First of all when I get on a run of shooting H when I run out of money or have another reason to stop I will do whatever I can to not stop. Often this means wd'ing for much longer than I need to and then either dosing sub or finding H. This is a big problem and affects my life in many ways.
If you can set boundaries and decide exactly when your going to use and when your not then if you have a benzo you can just take that for a day then dose sub the next day then dose for as many days as needed and I find I will feel a shot of H fine the very day after my last dose of Sub as long as it was in the morning.
This also keeps tolerance down.

The hardest part is stopping and actually taking the damn sub instead of chasing H until your way sicker than you need to be and finally realising defeat and that there's no possible way to get yourself some smack.
The worst is when you dose and then right after you end up scoring. That is the most frustrating feeling!

But subs really do help for a lot of things.

 

[the_ketaman]

The only way I've managed to continue using heroin after 19 years and keep a relatively low tolerance is to swap from Suboxone to heroin interchangeably which is incredibly difficult.
First of all when I get on a run of shooting H when I run out of money or have another reason to stop I will do whatever I can to not stop. Often this means wd'ing for much longer than I need to and then either dosing sub or finding H. This is a big problem and affects my life in many ways.
If you can set boundaries and decide exactly when your going to use and when your not then if you have a benzo you can just take that for a day then dose sub the next day then dose for as many days as needed and I find I will feel a shot of H fine the very day after my last dose of Sub as long as it was in the morning.
This also keeps tolerance down.

The hardest part is stopping and actually taking the damn sub instead of chasing H until your way sicker than you need to be and finally realising defeat and that there's no possible way to get yourself some smack.
The worst is when you dose and then right after you end up scoring. That is the most frustrating feeling!

 

[Tetrapharmakos]

ULDN absolutely is effective at mitigating tolerance growth long term, but it will not completely halt tolerance growth 100%, it only slows it by maybe about 80%.

IMO SR-17018 should not be used for slowing tolerance growth. SR-17018 reverses tolerance and it is very effective at rapidly reversing tolerance. It should only be taken for a few weeks at a time, as SR-17's ability to cause a tolerance to build to its own effects appears to be dose and/or duration dependent. In other words, taking it for more than a few weeks in a row begins to negate any reason to take it to begin with as you will eventually begin to build some tolerance to the SR-17 rather than only reversing tolerance.

I suppose for a plan of very long term use while maintaining the ideal tolerance, I would use ULDN daily ahead of every dose of opiates, but then I would cycle every few months or maybe 1/2 times a year as needed to using SR-17018 for tolerance reversal.

Just be very very cautious if you switch to only taking SR-17 for a week and then go back to heroin. It absolutely is very effective at rapid tolerance reduction. People have OD'd not being cautious enough with their tolerance when using their usual DOC after a week of only SR-17.

Edit: I should add that there are other things you can take in conjunction with ULDN to slow tolerance growth, such as agmatine sulfate, potentially NAC, etc. but these things will not cause tolerance reversal, only further slow tolerance growth.