Misc Hypersensitive to Drugs

[Stringer_Bell]

I'm late 30's now. When I was 17 I could drop acid, trip all night, sleep an hour or two then just feel a little tired the next day. Or I could get smashed (on alcohol) and do the same.

Now any time I take any drug it knocks me sideways for days. Coke, MDMA, Oxy, Alcohol, Dexedrine, even Shrooms. I take them, get varying degrees of satisfaction from them then feel terrible for days afterwards. And I'm not doing a lot by any means. Coke might be 0.5g over a few hours, MDMA - 200mg over a night, Shrooms - 1.5 g or so. And I'm not doing them that often, normally spacing drug use weeks apart.

The day after using I'll feel almost physically ill, very low mood, no energy, depressed about everything. I'll recover fully after 4-5 days.

I don't know why this is the case but the conclusion is obvious - I have to stop taking drugs. Largely I have. I've done drugs a couple of times in the last few months. Not because I want to stop but because I just can't handle them anymore.

The problem is I don't necessarily want to never take drugs again. Ideally I'd like to be able to take an Oxy occasionally, roll once a year or so, take Dexedrine when I have a lot on, do shrooms once in a blue moon.

Am I ever going to be able to go back to light drug use without suffering for days on end afterwards? For now I intend on taking a long break (maybe a year at least).

I'm in physically very good condition (exercise a lot), not taking other meds, good diet, etc. I just feel annoyed that I can't seem to use drugs to any degree at all when other people enjoy them pretty regularly. I don't want to be dependent or a very regular drug user but a life without any drug use at all seems kind of dull.

 

[keeping]

sounds like you're just experiencing what its like to age mate, when i was 16 i could stay awake on mephedrone for 3-4 days then drink myself into a coma and be fully functional the next morning

these days (i'm 24) my hangovers are so bad that i'm seriously considering quitting drinking

time makes fools of us all (life sux then u die)

 

[MrRoot]

Keeping, think about how your hangovers are when you turn thirty

I actually quitted drinking partly because of the hangovers getting worse.

 

[Stringer_Bell]

Thanks for the replies. Well, yet another reason why aging sucks

I think my reaction to drugs goes beyond simple aging though, I mean 0.5g of coke putting me in a week long depression? Same with MDMA. Can't be that common surely?

Think I'm just going to make it once a year and accept that I'll feel terrible for days after. The thought of resigning myself to never taking a drug again is pretty depressing.

 

[keeping]

hey stringer, not trying my hand at some ad-hoc psychology but you mention 'depressing/depression' in a lot of your posts, have you considered these adverse reactions aren't down to your physical state/age but rather your mental one? i would imagine someone who is depressed, then takes a stimulant which messes around with serotonin and dopamine would feel comedowns similar to yours.

maybe focus on getting your head in the right place before you begin to worry about drugs? (just a suggestion)

Keeping, think about how your hangovers are when you turn thirty

I actually quitted drinking partly because of the hangovers getting worse.

the horror..

 

[Stringer_Bell]

Thanks Keeping. I should have mentioned I have long standing depression and anxiety issues (but have been off meds for a good few months). You're right thought, I suppose it's foolish for somebody with depression to be messing around with drugs that affect neurochemistry. I'm probably trying all the time to get back to the 'glory days' of drug use, way before I ever suffered depression and I could just enjoy drugs. It's jealousy of those that can just enjoy them and not suffer bad consequences I suppose.

 

[Keif' Richards]

Stringer, unfortunately, all or most of the drugs that you seem to enjoy, fall into a category which I would describe as being acutely, very taxing on the body. The stimulants, Amphetamines/MDMA etc. dehydrate, exhaust and deplete your mind and body's various "feel good" chemicals. Alcohol is just a bastard all around; dehydration, build up of [even moreso] toxic substances in the body through metabolic process and harm caused to essentially every organ in the body.

These chemicals are hard for everyone to recover from, but the unwritten rule is that recovery from these experiences will get harder and harder the older you get and the more you use. I don't know what exactly causes this phenomenon. It's probably a combination of many things, but it does appear to be real. I used to be able to drink about a 750ml (Fifth) of liquor, have a good night's sleep and wake up the following morning around 8:30, feeling well-rested and practically rejuvenated. Those days however, are long-gone.

Nowadays, if I have even 4 glasses of white wine for example, I will wake up hungover and feeling shitty the following day, hating my life. It's a very drastic change from what I used to be able to handle. Stimulants on the other hand have always kicked my ass. If it wasn't for the inevitability of that brutal comedown, I could almost see stimulants becoming my drug of choice.

I guess all of these factors have probably contributed to me being an Opioid user. There's really no negative side-effects from Opioid use, at least in an accute sense. Bringing me to my point. Perhaps you should switch over your recreational drug use to something(s) that aren't quite so hard on the body.

I still use drugs on a regular basis, but I've cut out alcohol from my life almost entirely and I'm thankful for doing it. I feel that I have a much better quality of life without Alcohol as a part of it and you could feel the same way.

 

[Stringer_Bell]

Thanks so much Keif. The really weird thing is if it were just stims or alcohol I could understand. But shrooms and even opiates are having a bad effect on me. I took 70mg Oxy on Saturday (after 7 weeks of total abstention) and have been feeling dreadful the last two days. There is no question it's withdrawals, I am definitely not physically addicted to opiates and have never been. So it's a genuine 'hangover' which I know isn't supposed to even happen after opiates.

I'm cursed (or blessed) I guess.

Edit: There is one class of drugs I can use which DON'T give me any bad after effects - benzos. The problem is they have absolutely zero recreational value for me. I take them when I can't sleep (1mg of Xanax or Clonazepam) and it knocks me out.

 

[Ksa]

There's something wrong with your thalamus, it looks like it's rejecting input from your pre-frontal cortex. What I would do, and as a disclaimer to moderators, please don't ban me, this is what I would do and I wouldn't advise anyone to do this, ok, I can talk now? Good. Lol. What I would do is:

I would skip 3 consecutive nights of sleep using Dexedrine and Clonidine to stay up, total insomnia. Regular insomnia without drugs won't work because it's the pre-frontals that need to lack sleep.

Here's the tricky part. After 3 days, cold turkey the Dexedrine and the Clonidine and wait to get tired. When you grow tired, take nicotine, 2mg piece/hour and stay up for 1 more night using just nicotine. During that day you will experience symptoms of narcolepsy so watch out not to be in a position where you can fall and hit your head against something hard, but stay awake for as long as you can. Don't drive of course, goes without saying, in fact don't leave your home.

And this is when it gets really tricky. When you feel like you can't stay awake anymore, take 25% of your usual XR Dexedrine dose (XR is preferable but IR is ok too) and just pass out in bed immediately after swallowing it. When you wake up, if you slept through your dose for over 4 hours you know it worked, then continue having nicotine until again, you grow really tired, then take 12.5% of your usual Dexedrine dose and pass out in bed again. Eventually, when you reach 6.25% of your usual dose, you will wake up after only 1:30h, and won't be able to sleep through the effect.

You can then resume life, and will notice that something has changed, the Dexedrine will have more effect with lesser doses, and you'll need less benzos to get to bed. This is what works FOR ME. The trick is, in deep sleep, your brain uses half the amount of glucose it normally uses and during that time, important repairs take place. What the Dexedrine seems to do from my observation, is that it sets unusually high standards for those repairs. It's like, it's telling the brain, I was so terribly tired and I passed out, but look, these are the dopamine levels with which I passed out, so you need to increase that. It so turns out that those dopamine levels are artificially increased, and the repairs that take place will boost everything, beyond the normal scope of sleep.

However, if you wake up 1:30h after taking Dexedrine, your brain is telling you that it learned your trick! So then it no longer works lol. You have to be unaware for over 4 hours after taking Dexedrine for it to work.

 

[Stringer_Bell]

Thanks Ksa. It's a very interesting suggestion. I do think there's something weird going on with my brain. However the method you advocate sounds pretty scary to me and I think I'd be wary of psychosis, not to mention that it sounds like a very unpleasant experience to go through. Would be interested to hear others input!

 

[Ilove2nod]

First of all, great user name stringer_bell. I loved "The Wire", great show! Secondly, what were the meds you were taking? You said you haven't been on your meds for over a few months right? And did you notice them helping with your depression issues and whatever else or not when you still took them? I know without my klonopin I would be an anxiety ridden, asshole these days. Before I found benzos I was super quiet and shy mainly around people I didn't know well which sucked and also I was just always nervous and anxious to the point that it would just make me miserable. As soon as I started taking them daily I became much more talkative, happy, and had almost no anxiety at all, it was like this missing link that I needed to have or something when I found them, they just made life so much easier. As long as I don't run out early or anything(like I used to do when I first got them, because I wasn't on a high enough dose) I am good. Benzo withdrawls are the worst w/d's though no doubt if you take them daily and suddenly stop, I have gone through them a few times and it sucked so bad, made opiate withdrawls seem like nothing at all to me. But hey you might want to try taking something for your depression, like if what ever meds you were taking worked I would assume you would probably have gone back on them, but if not then maybe try some other meds and find something that works for you? I don't know.. I tried anti depressants before trying benzos and the SSRIs or anti depressants I tried like Prozac and Lexapro for example didn't do a damn thing to help me with anxiety/depression whatsoever, but when I took benzos like klonopin and also valium for a while too (instead of kpins) I felt like someone turned on a light in a dark room, it was a night and day difference and made my life so much better! Hope you find a way to get out of that depression it sounds like your dealing with. I know coming down off stims without anything to curb that comedown like weed, benzos, or opiates sucks major ass too especially if you are already somewhat depressed anyways. I hate coming off of coke so bad, I can deal with amphetamine comedowns usually pretty well (at least with klonopin). but coke is just awful for those few hours after you run out if you don't have anything to bring you down, and sometimes still sucks even with something to bring you down. Anyways hope you can figure it out soon.

 

[Ksa]

Thanks Ksa. It's a very interesting suggestion. I do think there's something weird going on with my brain. However the method you advocate sounds pretty scary to me and I think I'd be wary of psychosis, not to mention that it sounds like a very unpleasant experience to go through. Would be interested to hear others input!

You don't have to do that, I don't do it often either cause I gotta go to work, but like, when I wake up at 2am to go take a leak, I take a bit of dexedrine before passing out in bed again, so when I wake up at 6:45am to go to work, I'm like fully wired when the alarm rings and then, the smallest dose of dex has a big effect. If I have to compare my day to waking up groggy and hitting my head against the door knob of my bathroom trying to keep my eyes open, that's a net improvement.

I can't even remember the days when i was tired in the morning honestly. I look at other people say they're tired and I think haha sucks to be you! LOL I'm like, never tired. It's almost like the sleep quality is really good when you manage to sleep through a small dex dose. It's like fuck, it replenishes your soul man. Plus I'm like super motivated in the past few years from doing that I'm like fuck, that's not like me, I never used to be motivated. It's the trick man, wake up to take a pee, and chunk! crack! Get a little bit man, swallow a tiny bit then go to bed. Works miracles in the morning.

 

[JustferFun]

Stringer, I thought I was the only one! I can relate 1000% I could never understand how my friends could do whatever they wanted with only minor after-effects. This happened to me even when I was young. I could drink and recover pretty fast, but everything else was brutal.

I also have pretty bad anxiety and depression. The first time I ever took ecstasy, I was wrecked for the next week. Even with mushrooms, I would feel off for several days. Same with cocaine and with opiates. Basically everything besides alcohol and weed. Opiates tend to have a smoother come down for me, but I still get elevated anxiety. That's just from one dose. The longer I go, the worse it gets.

I was kind of in denial about this for years because it just didn't make sense to me. I had never seen or heard of anyone else having a problem like that. Don't get me wrong, I still mess around, even though I know I shouldn't. Now I just try to keep things to a single dose/ session. If I do opiates for a couple days, it really increases my anxiety and depression.

It's kind of nice to know that there's someone else out there like me. It's validating. I realize now that a lot of my drug use was an attempt at self medicating. This past year was not good for me. The depression has become pretty treatment-resistant and it was so bad for so long that I was just desperate. I've had a bit of a heroin problem, but I think I've turned a corner on that.

Kratom is great for mood, and it has the least detrimental after-effects out of anything I've ever done. But I have to be careful not to overdo it because it will come back to bite me in the ass if I take too much for too long.

Basically, anything that elevates my mood causes me to crash and feel like shit. It's fucking unfair.

 

[Stringer_Bell]

Hi JustferFun,

I have to be honest, I'm also kind of glad that I'm not the only one who can't handle drugs! I actually feel pretty jealous of friends that can seem to do whatever and hardly suffer for it. I feel very 'weak' by comparison.

I suppose the real blessing in all this is that while I went through a kind of general addiction the last few months , the scale of it has been laughable compared to what some go through, purely because the amount of drugs I could do before being pretty much a wreck was so small. If I had real stamina for drugs probably I would have ended up doing an eight ball of coke a day, instead of doing 0.5g lol then taking a week just to recover enough to do it again, lol. Same with opiates - it's pretty difficult for me to get addicted just because I end up feeling bad for days after doing them.

I don't want to think I'll never do drugs again but even doing them once a month is too much for me. That means feeling bad for a week out of every month. I think feeling bad for a week every six months is probably acceptable so I'll keep it to that.

It's a real shame for me because even though it may be dumb I like the idea of integrating fairly regular (although not heavy) drug use into life somehow but I'm just not built for it anymore.

I've never tried Kratom but may give it a go.

As you say the worst thing is we feel bad with anxiety and depression anyway so it would be nice to escape ourselves every once in a while but we just end up feeling worse! Antidepressants stopped working for me and I've tried a lot of different types.

 

[sekio]

Staying awake for 3 days and binging on amphetamine and nicotine isn't going to fix anything, just so you know. In fact it's likely to leave you feeling even worse. Ksa is just a troll these days who likes to make up harmful shit