Opioids There is no way I should have felt that shot...but I did!

[MisterJohnson]

The other day we drove down to the city to pick up some heroin. My friend, who is prescribed morphine for severe pain, ran out early. He couldn't drive because of WDs, so I was basically just going as chauffer. For a few days prior, I had been IVing 2mg of suboxone (the new generic pills) once or twice a day, for the buzz, not for detox/maintenance. The dope from this girl is always at least good, sometimes is absolutely unreal. My friend got I-forget-how-many bags, and gave me one because he's a good friend. I had done 2mg of bupe perhaps 3hrs before picking up the dope. Another friend I was with said this batch was good enough that it would probably break through a little bit. I did not think so, but started cooking it up anyway, figuring that at the worst I just wouldn't feel it.

I was floored. Absolutely. The rush was great and the high had legs like a supermodel. If I had not had any bupe in me, I probably would have OD'd. This is confuses me, as I understood buprenorphine to have such a high binding affinity that it wouldn't matter how much dope one did, as long as the levels of bupe in one's system is high enough. My bupe levels were definitely high enough. Even accounting for a shorter half-life because of my ROA, with the dose and frequency of my bupe shots, I should have had between 4 and 8mg total in my system, off the top of my head.

I can think of only two possibilities, given what I THINK I know: 1) It was not heroin, but some other strong opiate with an even higher affinity for opioid receptors than buprenorphine, or 2) the new generic suboxones are not as advertised.

I thought that buprenorphine's blocking effect gets a little shaky once you get below 2mg, but I had way more than that in me. Or is there some full agonist that kicks bupe off of receptors? It would be terrible if the new generics have less bupe than they are supposed to, for the sake of the people who need it. Are any of my assumptions incorrect? Are there other possibilities I haven't thought of?

 

[Serotonin101]

I've thought of this before as I was able to get high after taking 8mg bupe sublingually. My idea is that all the receptors were not saturated with bupe so that heroin still had an effect.

 

[alovesupreme]

if you are on a low(ish) dose of bupe you can definitely punch through with doses of other strong opiates. my girl used to do that all the time when she was on sub maintenance (naughty!) that you got high isn't too surprising to me, i could definitely see one bag of fire (roughly defined as containing at least 20-30% of some kind of strong opiate, experience and expectation may vary depending on locale, never can tell with street bags) IVd punching through any bupe in your system, if your dose is 2 mg, especially if you dose irregularly (recreational vs maintenance).

 

[tricomb]

What's the HR value of this thread?

PM me if you come up with one, this thread is just asking for speculation and I'm afraid we can't give definitive answers. The FDA is supposed to be regulating the quality control of all generic products, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has little to no faith in our quality-control governing agencies.

If you're outside of the USA then you should have some equivalent of the US FDA, and we have to just assume that all generic legitimate brands are what they say they are. Sometimes with other medications, it's clear that one generic clearly works better than another, but is that because it contains more of the active ingredient? or is it simply a more effective delivery vessel? Its hard to say, and it's not scientific to make such assumptions...

So basically what Im saying is I understand where you're coming from, but there's not much we can do as far as answering your questions about whether generic buprenorphine products contain more or less active ingredient than is listed, and your other question isn't really a question, saying "I shouldnt have felt that shot but I did" is more like blog material and is certainly not OD material.

I thought it was common knowledge that below 2mg buprenorphine doesn't really act as an antagonist, particularly on it's own euphoric metabolite, norbuprenorphine. However, dose and patient depend on many factors on a case by case basis, hard to determine all in one, because one size does not fit all. So, I'm not sure what was in your heroin that allowed it to punch through the buprenorphine which regardless of the dose should still have a MUCH HIGHER binding affinity than heroin, but it's pointless to speculate. It was probably just super dope heroin. But what's the point in a bunch of us saying that over and over?

/thread