Would tramadol compete for Mu receptor w/ Heroin, or add to the high?

[PhorIndicator]

i know tramadol competes with hydrocodone for its high, and basically cancels out the hydrocodone high, because they are both competting for Mu receptor and I guess tramadol is stronger?

Anyway, i dont care about that, i just want to know if it would have any similar effects with heroin. Would it compete with the heroin for the Mu, or add to it (potentiate it in some way)?

Please no posts about "why do tramadol if you have heroin blah blah blah)." I just want an answer, not annoying worthless comments that take up time and space, literally.

 

[BilZ0r]

Tramadol is a partial agonist, or, if you like, a partial antagonist. It's not a matter of stronger or weaker, it just about doses. If you get enough tramadol in your brain so that it's occupying lots of receptors (~>50%), the likelyhood is that your hydrocodone or your heroin isn't going to be able to bind. And as tramadol only partially stimulates the receptors in comparison to your HC or heroin, this is a bad thing.

I don't know whether you need an analogy or not, but one I think of is like, if you had 10 computers, and you had two kinds of typists, inputing data, one that can type slow (tramadol), and one that can type fast (Hydrocodone). If you say had 1 slow data inputer, this would be better than nothing, as you'd still get some stuff typed (high). And if you had say a couple slow and a couple fast, this would be okay too, because they wouldn't get in each others way.

But as soon as you had over 5 of each, then you'd start having problems, as the slow ones would occationally kick the fast ones of the computer (tramadol replaces HC at the receptor), and this slows down your total rate of typing (less high). If you started having heaps of slow typists, and the same amount of fast typists, you'd actually slow down your rate of typing, because eventually you'd start kicking off all of your fast typists.

So essentially, if you had a low dose of HC, a low dose of tramadol would boost your high, but if you had a high dose of HC, then tramadol would decrease it. Just like how you can reverse a heroin overdose with high doses of buprenorphine.

Hope you didn't get offended by my analogy. Figured it was better to put it in that not.