When I was recently on vicodin following minor surgery, I was shocked when it “cured” the chronic anxiety and depression I deal with. I didn’t feel a sense of euphoria, but a more generalized sense of peace and calm. I know that vicodin is a narcotic, and therefore heavily regulated due to its addictive nature - but why? Are there any negative side effects on the body from constant use of narcotics?
I think I can safely say that my friend is “addicted” to the paxil that he takes - each of the five times he’s tried to go off of it, even stepping down doses, the withdrawl effects have been so terrible that he had no choice but to resume taking it. Why is he allowed, even encouraged, to take Paxil while I’m legally unable to get a full-time vicodin prescription?
Opiates are great for fixing all kinds of psychological problems. Depression and anxiety melt away. Even schizophrenic symptoms improve with a high enough dose.
I know someone who had the exact same response to a single pill of Percodan given in the ER. She ran right out to her psychiatrist (who had been treating her depression with only modest success for years) to give him the good news that she had discovered the cure and would he please give her a lifetime prescription? He, of course declined, so she went on the internet and started buying opiates herself.
Fast forward three years…She paid me an enormous sum of money to get out of the hellish hole she had dug herself into. She had stopped working, isolated in her basement office, spent incredible amounts of money on drugs and was unable to get off the stuff despite heroic attempts at self-detox.
Opiates don’t do any significant damage to the body. However, in modern culture, it is virtually impossible to keep up with the increasing doses required by the development of tolerance to the drug. Sooner or later you will not be able to get enough and then the fun begins.
BTW, Vicodin, Percocet, and the commonly prescibed formulations of codeine all contain significant doses of acetominophen (Tylenol) which is a great liver killer when you get up to twenty or thirty pills a day.
One of the problem with opiates is that, while you build up tolerance quickly, that tolerance will erase itself if you go a while without the drug. Then, when you take the dose you were used to before, it is suddenly too much for your body to handle, and you could overdose easily.
If you’re really curious about the specific drug you took, I’d recommend looking it up in the online version of Clarke’s Analysis of Drugs and Poisons or Martindale’s Complete Drug Reference (both available at www.medicinescomplete.com for a 15-day trial). These are academic discussions of the side effects you can experience from opiate addiction or abuse, and aren’t tainted by a political view.
As Little Cloud said, most of the commonly-prescribed opioid formulations include acetaminophen, which is obviously a bad thing if you’re taking more than the normal amount. But let’s say you got on a methadone program instead…
After a certain amount of time with your opiate receptors constantly saturated, perhaps six months or a year or two or three, the positive effects you feel would essentially vanish and you would be left with the negative effects like constipation and physical dependence. People who have been on methadone for years who started it before have almost universally confirmed this to me.
It’s really a bad idea. The anxiety medications and antidepressants that we have now are not as immediately effective, but one of the reasons people have spent so much money developing such medications is to avoid the whole dependence and addiction issue.
I was addicted to Vicodin for 3 years. The tolerance builds up rather quickly. At the end, I was taking up to 15 pills a day. Wondering where the next pill is coming from has a way of killing any sense of “well-being” the pill produces.
After a 3 day stay in detox, I’ve been off them for 4 years. Do not become take Vicodin unless it’s legitimately prescibed for pain. You need only do a google search for Vicodin to see how many people are suffering from this addiction and will do absolutely anything to feed it.
About your friend’s Paxil problem, is he/she getting help from a doctor in coming off the Paxil? It sounds like he/she has tried ramping off slowly, but there are other things a Doctor can do to help (including substituting another drug to reduce the problems coming off Paxil. If he/she still has the underlying condition that put them onto Paxil to begin with, then coming off could revive that condition which would not be a good thing.
As for Opiates, if they were freely available without ancetimorphene added would there be much danger directly from the opiate drug itself? Also does tollerance to one opiate create tollerance to all opiates? i.e. if someone builds up a tollerance for Morphine would they be similarly tollerant to codene?
It’s true that your body quickly develops a tolerance to opiates but the bitch of that is the more you take, the less your brain releases epinephrine and norepinephrine which is why when you don’t get your “fix” you are in excruciating pain. That in itself is harmful to the body. Just ask a heroin addict what they feel like when they can’t get a fix. You need more and more to kill the pain and then the doses can become toxic. You don’t think that’s harmful?
There isn’t really much physical danger from the opiate itself, especially not morphine or methadone or other drugs that are given long-term, other than constipation (which can be pretty dangerous, really, and agonizing, so you have to deal with it properly). Some other varieties seem to have some negative effects – I’m thinking of the hearing loss that people have reported from hydrocodone addictions (like Rush Limbaugh’s). But I don’t know if that’s from the hydrocodone itself, or from something else that is in the pills. And of course there are all sorts of dangers you expose yourself to if you inject opioids like heroin.
Tolerance to one opioid creates tolerance to all the others – they all produce their effects by binding to the same receptors. The mu-opioid receptor is the one responsible for the euphoria and other “good feelings” aspects of taking opiates.
Along the same lines, suppose you could have an electrode implanted in your brain’s pleasure center. You could press a button to stimulate this area of your brain with a non-harmful voltage level. What’s the harm?
Would something like this help people get off opiates?
Also, is recreational electrode implantation against the law? Otherwise, I wonder why nobody is offering such a potentially lucrative service.
I don’t think there is any data on it, but I have no doubt that it would indeed help people get over chemical addictions, basically replacing it with an electrical addiction. Larry Niven makes much the same point throughout his Known Space books.
I recall in The Terminal Man that Michael Crichton had characters discuss this. IIRC, they figured that it didn’t really need to be outlawed because nobody would cold-bloodedly seek to get such surgery – nobody would choose to go through brain surgery like that when they hadn’t even felt the effects yet. That was back in 1970, though, and I don’t know the current legal status – if it is not currently illegal, it may yet become so, and one thing that would surely cause a push for such a law would be people offering the procedure.
I bet the reason nobody is currently offering it is the risks of brain surgery and the complicated hardware, knowledge, and time that it takes to get it right for each individual. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, though, might change that. We’ll have to see.
And because it doesn’t produce the same changes in the brain that the truly “addictive” drugs do, because it doesn’t affect the reward system. Drugs that do that usually affect the dopamine system, while Paxil is an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
I don’t believe Vicodin is controlled because of its addictive nature - simply because it’s a narcotic. Addiction isn’t the issue, euphoria and altered states seem to be the problem (eg marijuana).
The negative side effects of narcotics are primarily behavioral/emotional (and of course legal). Narcotics addiction interferes with your ability to relate to others and maintain rewarding relationships, stunts emotional adaptation and growth etc.
The idea with Paxil et al is to help with a mood disorder without creating these extra problems, and possibly leaving the subject receptive to therapy (not sure how well that works out in practice).
Although narcotics do reduce anxiety and depression, it’s one of the worst solutions I can think of. A little like cutting off your head to cure migraines. There are many better therapeutic options - including appropriate medication.
I’m a nurse who has worked, published and taught in the addiction field for 25 years. I have a small private practice helping addicts who can’t or won’t go into detox or rehab. This particular patient had some minor celebrity and checked out of the two hospitals I checked her into within 24 hours. She was a clever girl, and figured out how to separate the opiate from the acetominophen as someone has mentioned but that is a bit of a hassle. She did her research and read that adding some benzodiazepine to the opiate would potentiate it so a second addiction was added. While it is usually safe to attempt out-patient detox from opiates the same cannot be said for benzos. Hence, she required 24 hour nursing care at home for almost three weeks before we could even begin treating the addiction.
For a susceptible individual (like me!) the reaction to the first dose of an opiate is a lot like a great big ol’ hug from God! All the cares, fears, anxieties, woes, and all that was wrong with one’s life vanish, and are replaced by a warm fuzzy oneness with the universe. Everything is going to be ok! Forever and ever!
Until the opiate wears off.
Quite quickly, it takes more and more opiates to get less and less of the effect, until pretty soon one is taking enough to stun a blue whale merely to feel “normal”. Then “subnormal”. Eventually that hug from God turns into a dutch rub from your weird uncle Bill. It may not feel that nice, but it’s familiar and somewhat reassuring, and better than how you feel if you don’t get any opiates.
Also, the chronic constipation can be a bit burdensome, unless the addict is aggressively working a bowel program with fluids, fiber, and a stool softener, supplemented with laxatives. And the nausea and vomiting that will frequently occur for many addicts becomes a problem when one is so obtunded by the drug that one aspirates, gurgles, and dies. But frankly opiates are a lot less toxic than alcohol.
But the nice thing about opiates (methadone excepted) is that usually withdrawal is over in about 72 hours, and it’s pretty risk-free medically! Methadone withdrawal is also risk-free, but it can go on for months.
Enough rambling. There was already plenty of good commentary in this thread before I added my 2 cents.
I don’t know the scientifics behind it, but I’ve been on opiates for three years and I wouldn’t consider myself “addicted.” I have had them prescribed for chronic pain, and I find that as long as I maintain control over my dosage I can keep on the same amount and not need more and more. I can see where it would be easy to accumulate a tolerance, but again, it’s about control. If I ran out tomorrow, I would miss them, but I wouldn’t go through severe withdrawals because I’ve never taken a high enough amount to have much to withdraw from.
That’s the problem though, a lot of people can’t control it and that’s where they get into a mess. I’ve had friends who were taking 20-30 pills a day, compared to the 3-5 I take daily. My dosage hasn’t increased at all, and at times I cut way back to ensure the effectiveness. It’s not a problem for me, and I’m grateful for the relief I get from the medication.
