I’m wondering which drugs out there are the most powerful pain-killers, legal or otherwise. Morphine is the strongest drug I’ve seen used for pain (after abdominal surgery); is there anything stronger/more effective?
Ideally, I’d like somebody to say, “Well, according to my professors at med school, X is the most potent drug known to science.” I’ve been unable to find anything really good along these lines on the net–maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places.
Let me say that this isn’t a search for medical advice, nor do I want to engage in a “I-like-to-get-stoned-on-this-drug” conversation. This is a serious question and I don’t want to see this thread get locked or deleted or anything.
Thanks in advance people!
Notice how I avoided making any bad “Straight Dope” puns . . .
Of those narcotics available on prescription, Fentanyl (Sublimaze) is the most potent on a milligram for milligram basis. Here is a chart comparing equivalent analgesic doses.
Keep in mind that narcotics, like all drugs, affect different people differently. I’m sure morphine, for instance, is a powerful narcotic. It has no such effect on me, however … after I had knee surgery, the nurses kept giving me more and more when it wasn’t working at all, and they might just as well have pumped me full of syrup of ipecac. No pain relief, no happy magic floaty land, just an endless display of my gastro-intestinal system discovering reverse.
(My pain reliever of choice is Toradol (aka Ketorolac) but I don’t believe it’s a narcotic)
Same here. I hope that I don’t ever need a good pain-reliever. I’m sure that the doctors will take awhile believe that morphine just doesn’t work for me.
Yesterday, I was watching a show on poisonous fish and snakes of the ocean. They said that pain killers found in the poisons of these fish were many times stronger than morphine.
From the research paper I did, heroin is very high up there. It is more potent than morphine, with a ratio of 2:3 in regards to heroin:morphine doses and effectiveness. The H-bomb works exactly like morphine, and it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. However, because of the two acetyl groups tagged onto the morphine molocule of heroin, it crosses the blood-brain barrier much faster and more effectively, making a sense of euphoria almost instantaneous. It kicks in fully about two minutes after administration.
Interesting side note: heroin was first marketed as a replacement to morphine, billed as having no addictive properties.
[mild hijack] It didn’t have any effect on my mind. The only thing making me less than my usual self was the fact that I was in a LOT of pain. If it’d sent me on a happy little trip I wouldn’t’ve minded the pain so much. [/mild hijack]
Medically speaking, narcotics mean opiates. The more strongly the opiate molecule binds to the opiate receptor, the more powerful it is. One of the most powerful is Sufenta, binding ten times more strongly than even fentanyl.
As others have pointed out, the word “narcotic” refers to a specific type of drug. LSD and Nicotine are not narcotics.
However, due to the federal gov’ts overuse of the word, it seems as though the word “narcotic” now represents any drug in the mind of the public. Kind of annoying. But I guess it provides a useful loophole. When I went away to college, my dad told me that he’d cut off my college funding if he found out I used any narcotic. As an occassional user of cannabis, I agreed, hoping that I could get away with my smoking…considering that marijuana is not, strictly speaking, a narcotic…
Unfortunately, frinkboy, that depends on who’s doing the defining. By some medical definitions, any drug which reduces pain and induces sleepiness is a narcotic. Marijuana would qualify by that description. By other definitions, only those drugs which activate the opiate receptors qualify. In legalese, it can be any controlled substance, including pharmaceutical testosterone.
Thanks for the comments/info people, especially those of you who provided links. I guess I should have used the word “painkiller” instead of “narcotic,” but fortunately everybody seemed to understanad what I meant. I guess I chose my wording because it’s mostly just narcotics that I’ve seen prescribed for serious pain.
Courts define narcotics differently from most doctors to include drugs restricted by law. To avoid confusion, many doctors refer to opiates.
Morphine and codiene both come from poppies and are natural opiates. Semi-synthetic opiates are created by chemical processing, e.g. heroin is diacetylmorphine. More processing tends to mean a more potent drug, meaning a smaller amount has the same effect. The four members of the fentanyl family (Lo, Remi, Al and Su) are completely synthetic and more than 80 times more potent than morphine.
But this does not mean fentanyl, or sufenta, is necessarily the best painkiller. Furthermore, due to its short half life, the withdrawal effects can be very severe. Not all pains even respond to opiates.
