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Totally immune to benzos

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#1 ·
The other week I gave my friend, Patty, some 2 mg diclazepam tablets.

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Diclazepam

She was to be my Guinea Pig to see if they were the real thing or not, because I honestly can't tell.

She called me this afternoon around 4 PM upon waking. She'd taken 2 of the pills the night before and they evidently were effective in knocking out a tiny lady who's 5 feet & 105#.

OK, so now I know they're real.

I also know that I remained fully conscious and didn't feel drugged at all when I tried 60 of them (120 mg).

I can try such astronomical amounts as I bought 5,000 of them. To the medical community, which is fully convinced that benzos universally work for everybody, I would have to say that's a load of crap and I can prove it.

If any MD doesn't believe this I'd gladly eat a whole bottle of benzos in front of them, sit in their waiting room for two hours for them to reach peak effect, and then sit down with them fully conscious to have a sophisticated conversation with them, as their mouth hangs open in shock that I'm even awake, much less fully coherent.
 
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#7 ·
Have you ever heard my tale of Ambien, which at 10 mg might as well be Tic Tacs?

I bring this up as z-drugs like Ambien are closely related to benzos.

After trying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Ambien I was fully convinced that they didn't work at any dose.

So, I consumed the remainder of the bottle, which was 23 pills (230 mg) and, much to my surprise, it put me to sleep! And it was a truly fantastic 8 hour nap! I awoke feeling fully rested & truly refreshed, so unlike the norm where I wake up still feeling tired and taking forever to finally get my a** out of bed.

The medical community would frown upon this as it looks like totally irresponsible behavior or a suicide attempt, though it most certainly is neither of those. I damn well know the LD50 of Ambien is over 600 mg/kg in rats, so I'm 100% confident that a dinky 230 mg has a 0% chance of killing me, a creature that's over 100 kg.

I would NEVER do such a thing with a drug that presented any danger at too high a dose. For example, I tried amitriptyline for sleep. I was directed to take 20-30 mg at bed time. Well, that did nothing, so I upped it to the max recommended dose of 150 mg, which still did nothing (other than give me cotton mouth). I sure wasn't going any higher as I'm not an uninformed idiot as the medical community presumes all patients to be.

I damn well know that back in the day -- prior to the 1988 introduction of Prozac & start of "SSRIs solve every problem under the sun" -- that TCAs were a leading suicide drug as they can cause fatal heart rhythm problems in OD.

I'm VERY willing to "OD" on harmless drugs, but I'm not an idiot. I would fear telling the Ambien tale to any MD as they might see it as a suicide attempt, which frankly is highly insulting to my intelligence. If it was a suicide attempt, that would mean I'm a god damn moron who hasn't a clue as to what it takes to die. I damn well know 230 mg isn't even certain to kill a rat, most likely just giving the rodent a nap!

And given that I'm a "gun nut" do you seriously think that if I wanted to off myself I'd do it in some half-a**ed manner rather than using a method that is virtually 100% effective?

And that brings up my new pdoc who showed concern upon hearing that my hobby is target shooting. Ugh! Yes, I'm an NRA Life Member & I have a concealed carry permit, and something like 10 guns, two of which I keep loaded at all times. Actually 3 are loaded -- I forgot about the Glock. Gee, Miss Pdoc, I actually can have a cocked & locked 1911 sitting beside me and still I don't put a .45 caliber bullet in my brain. How incredibly shocking is that, you biased anti-gun b****.
 
#3 ·
I don't doubt that you react very poorly, if at all to benzos since I've gathered from your posts that this has always been a problem for you. They didn't even do very much the first time you took them did they?

However regardless of your response to benzos, considering the astronomical amounts you seem to have consumed in recent years, it's not surprising now that you aren't responding to them. Your tolerance has to be off the charts. I've heard of people that responded very well to benzos but ended up consuming so much that even 20-30 mg xanax didn't get them wasted. Many docs doesn't seem to understand this tolerance development and think it would kill a person or at the very least get them unconscious for days.
 
#9 ·
Many docs doesn't seem to understand this tolerance development and think it would kill a person or at the very least get them unconscious for days.
Ah, that reminds me of Dr. Jim who actually said when writing me a 90-day script for Xanax (360 mg in total) "I must trust you, since this much could kill you."

Does Dr. Jim not know what an LD50 is? Evidently not. The acute oral LD50 in rats is 331-2171 mg/kg.

OK, so my script has some chance of killing a rat, though most likely just producing a rodent nap. 0% chance of killing a human.

I knew a woman on SAS who ended up in the ER (against her will) for an Ativan OD of 50 mg. It was so "powerful" that she was fully awake for the next 8 hours. Now there's a mighty expensive medical non-emergency. In the ER and she can't even sleep it off, as she's fully awake! A fine waste of medical resources.

What the medical community refuses to understand -- to my great frustration -- is that benzos do NOT magically work for everyone. Every MD is 100% convinced that benzos are the be all end all of anxiety treatment and they refuse to accept the possibility that a few rare people don't respond to benzos, such that they require a non-benzo tranquilizer.

I've asked for phenobarbital, but I get this load of crap from every MD about how "it's too dangerous." Uh, would you like to see my concealed carry permit? I'm the guy who's worn a Glock loaded with 18 rounds of 9mm. Is it more dangerous than that Glock?

MDs are just a bunch of f***ing p****ies looking to prescribe entirely harmless drugs to cover their a**, not giving a damn about patients like me who fail to respond to their harmless crap. And it's hardly harmless when it condemns you to eternal suffering from anxiety.

Why not just prescribe sugar pills for all and have 100% safety.:roll
 
#4 ·
Why do you think that is? Tolerance or some sort of other GABAergic issue? Do you drink, and if so how does alcohol affect you?

I always needed larger than recommended doses of benzos to feel any effect, but I think with me it had to do with my years of alcohol abuse and maybe cross-tolerance. Klonopin is also the only benzo that seemed to have much effect on me at all in terms of reducing social anxiety. I've tried Xanax, Valium, and Ativan with no discernible effects.
 
#5 ·
Why do you think that is? Tolerance or some sort of other GABAergic issue? Do you drink, and if so how does alcohol affect you?
It's definitely not an issue of tolerance. When folks hear the staggering amounts of benzos I've used (I was on a prescribed dose of 10 mg/day of Xanax for 8 years) they assume that I got there because the little became more & more & more to get the same effect as time went by.

But that's not the way it happened at all. Benzos never did a damn thing for me from day one -- which was August 2000.

I get asked about alcohol a lot, even my last pdoc asked. My tolerance for alcohol is not at all unusual. In fact, I'm absolutely stunned when I read about the staggering amounts some other folks can drink. Amounts that I'd absolutely never be able to consume. This one guy asked me if I thought his drinking of 8 beers a day was excessive. I said "YES!" He actually asked the question a few times, as if somehow my answer was going to change, but it was still "YES!, you're drinking too damn much."

I'm drinking some chardonnay right now. It came out of a 5L box (that's 34 servings) that I opened back on March 31 and the box is still mostly full, so I've had perhaps 15 servings of wine in the last month. That sure isn't much by any standard.

I have noticed that I am drinking far less than usual, though I never was a heavy drinker. At my point of maximum alcohol consumption I was having about 3 servings a day.

I make sure to always have alcohol in the fridge just in case. It's the only thing that truly calms me. Well pot calms me too, but it makes me quite sleepy and costs way more than cheap wine (at 12.5% alc.)

I always needed larger than recommended doses of benzos to feel any effect, but I think with me it had to do with my years of alcohol abuse and maybe cross-tolerance. Klonopin is also the only benzo that seemed to have much effect on me at all in terms of reducing social anxiety. I've tried Xanax, Valium, and Ativan with no discernible effects.
How large a dose are we talking about?

I've never been able to discern any difference between benzos and I've tried all the common scripts: Valium, Ativan, Xanax, Klonopin. I've tried Onfi (Clobazam) -- now there's an exotic benzo I bet none of you guys know. I've tried an assortment of RC benzos: etizolam, clonazelam, diclazepam, nifoxipam, and something like three others that I can't even name. And they're all utterly useless.

I had a pdoc (the one who had me on 10 mg of Xanax) who speculated I was an ultra-fast metabolizer, though that seems questionable when we're talking about 60 tablets (120 mg) of diclazepam. How the hell could anyone metabolize that so fast as to not feel a damn thing?

It made me seriously wonder if this diclazepam was the real thing or fake garbage. My friend Patty gave 2 of the pills a try. She reports that she took one and didn't feel anything after 90 minutes, so she took the 2nd pill. She woke up at 4pm the next afternoon, pretty well convinced that they are indeed a real drug (Yes, Patty has a normal sleep schedule where she actually wakes up in the morning.) I point that out since I'm typically a nocturnal creature with delayed sleep phase disorder where waking up at 4 pm (after being awake all night) would not be at all shocking.

Then another pdoc so "brilliantly" said of my stunning lack of response to benzos: "I'm sure there's a reason, but I don't know what the reason is." See, I've entirely stumped the medical community & this was a highly rated pdoc, as opposed to a total idiot. He too wondered about my response to alcohol, which I honestly reported to him was entirely unremarkable.

At 6' & 250# I'm a big guy, but I still get intoxicated with very ordinary amounts of alcohol. In fact, I don't like being drunk and it's been years since I've been drunk. Anything over 5 drinks in a sitting is going to give me one hell of a headache.

And I'm actually feeling rather relaxed at the moment after 1/2 a mug of wine @ 12.5% alc, so one serving at most.
 
#8 ·
Don, I was conducting a legitimate experiment to see if benzos at any dose would work, which IMO was quite reasonable under my unique circumstances. (I don't recommend others do it, unless they want one hell of a long nap.) Note my post above where the same type of experiment revealed that Ambien actually works if the dose if high enough. Further experiments with Ambien revealed that "only" 100 mg was sufficient to make it an effective sleeping pill.

I appreciate your concern, Don, but benzos are remarkably non-toxic.

Do you know what happens if you go to the ER with a benzo OD? (I'm talking about benzos alone & no other drugs or alcohol.)

They put you in a hospital bed and you sleep it off, with absolutely no medical intervention at all, producing the world's most expensive nap. Why? There is a drug that reverses the effect of benzos, but it's likely to produce a seizure, thus simply sleeping it off is the standard "emergency" treatment of a benzo OD.
 
#10 ·
"After trying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Ambien I was fully convinced that they didn't work at any dose.

So, I consumed the remainder of the bottle, which was 23 pills (230 mg) and, much to my surprise, it put me to sleep! And it was a truly fantastic 8 hour nap! I awoke feeling fully rested & truly refreshed, so unlike the norm where I wake up still feeling tired and taking forever to finally get my a** out of bed"

:) good stuff !!

It is strange how these things work tho. Not even close to the scale you are talking about but I remember when 4mg of Zopiclone would drop me where I stand. The last time I had it, I had to take closer to 30 or 40mg to get drowsy !

What other meds do you take for insomnia, anxiety or depression? What worked well or did you have the same kind of issues with those?
 
#11 ·
What other meds do you take for insomnia, anxiety or depression? What worked well or did you have the same kind of issues with those?
-Saphris 10 mg for insomnia (have been on that for 3+ years)
-Nardil 90 mg
-Lamictal -- only at a mere 25 mg, since titration must be slow, painfully slow. I'll report the results in months after we get to a "real" dose.

That's what I take now. I'm not going to spend half an hour typing the laundry list of what I've tried.
 
#13 ·
You're tolerance must be very high given the amount of time you've been taking the benzos and the doses you've been taking.

I've tried valium, xanax, lorazepam, nitrazepam and clobazam.

I've also tried some novel ones like diclazepam, etizolam, clonazolam, and the flub's of which I only found etizolam remotely useful.

I'm from the UK so its nigh on impossible to get a benzo script over here so ive been forces to get all mine any other way possible. The only ones I can really get often are valium and etizolam (online)

I too feel like I have a natural tolerance to them but one thing I have noticed is that you definitely don't realise how much they have affected you sometimes, at times you can think tore completely sober but every other man and his dog can tell you're on something.

I'm pissed about not being able to get a benzo script because the ones that have worked for me (when I've took a high enough dose) have helped with my anxiety and racing horrible though and my OCD and insomnia.

The only thing my GP prescribes me is mirtazipine which kinda helps with my insomnia a bit, and I mean a bit and I don't think its really pulling me out of depression or helping with my anxiety and ita not like xanax where I can pop a couple of bars when i feel a panic attack coming on because they don't work like that.
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#17 ·
I too feel like I have a natural tolerance to them but one thing I have noticed is that you definitely don't realise how much they have affected you sometimes, at times you can think tore completely sober but every other man and his dog can tell you're on something.
I can & do read all my doc's notes, which indicate that I appeared perfectly normal, with them having no clue that in the 24-hour period leading up to one appointment I'd consumed 47 pills (mostly benzos, with some Soma tossed in for good measure).

So even an "expert" is entirely unable to tell that I'm filled to the brim with meds & they'd fall out of their chair in total shock if they saw the results of a tox screen. They'd wonder how the hell could anybody be so exceptionally drugged, yet carry on a conversation that is not merely coherent, but which is highly sophisticated & complex. I think it's safe to say that I'm not even close to the ordinary patient, discussing complex topics in an exceedingly well-informed manner, while most patients are utterly clueless and it shows. I, on the other hand, literally know far more about MAOIs than any of my docs ever have.

The one thing that is clear to my docs is that I definitely do my research & know what I'm talking about. I speak to my docs as equals and I would be highly insulted if they talked down to me as if I'm clueless simply because I lack an MD after my name.
 
#16 ·
That fails to tell us how much.

Xanax comes in 0.25, 0.5, 1 & 2 mg doses, so ten could be anything from a relatively modest 2.5 mg up to a whopping 20 mg which is my personal all time high.

You feel asleep, which most certainly is something. Benzos are used as sleeping pills and it sure looks like that Xanax worked as a sleeping pill on you.
 
#19 ·
Speaking of memory, one of my critics on SAS, pointed to how I could not specifically recall some post that I'd made long ago. He took that as evidence that my memory is impaired.

I take it as I've made some 36,000 posts over 14 years and I'm not going to recall every damn thing I've ever said in my lifetime.

Of course, I've also had another person note that I"m odd in how I could recall a distant event in such great detail.

So, ironically, I get in trouble as a "mental defective" whether I forget or whether my memory works great. This seems to be a game that can't be won.
 
#21 ·
Hey so I was doing some various reading and I came across the fact that benzos and alcohol are cross tolerant and recalled this thread.
I found this article mentioning something kind of similar to your situation http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/443469

"Massive doses of benzodiazepines (2,335 mg of diazepam intravenously, 21,225 mg of oxazepam orally) achieved only marginal control of delirium and agitation." Now this is a special case of a severe alcoholic going through withdrawals but the dosage is absolutely immense. It could possibly explain why you seem to have some built in tolerance to even large dosages of benzos.
 
#23 ·
When I tried Ativan it never did anything for my anxiety even when I took 3 pills rather than the one prescribed by the doc who said they knock some people out.

I suppose everyone is different but I can see why docs are fussed to prescribe them because of how easy it is to build up tolerance and abuse them as such even if you do really need them for anxiety struggles
 
#24 ·
We don't know what dose 3 pills is as Ativan comes in 0.5, 1 & 2 mg sizes, so three could be anything from 1.5 to 6 mg. Even 6 mg isn't a stunning amount, since Ativan is only half the potency of Xanax, so equal to 3 mg Xanax.

I know a former SAS member of "ODed" on something like 50 mg of Ativan. She ended up in the ER against her will for this total non-emergency, remaining fully awake for the next 8 hours. Going to the ER for something that doesn't even produce a nap is utterly ridiculous.
 
#25 ·
I know benzos and other medications have had no effects on my mood. Some have made me tired I'll admit. Doing better now off medications. Still feel really depressed and have anxiety, but I'm not as tired so I'm getting more done. Still much less than I want, but better than the nothing while I was on meds. My doctor still thinks I'm taking them, but I'm not bothering when he isn't listening that they aren't helping me in the least.

I'm having a ton of anxiety about tests I'm having at the hospital this month, so will be trying the lorazepam they prescribed me for the day of the tests. Hope it is strong enough to make me not care. Doubtful with as much anxiety as I'm having about it.
 
#26 ·
I never meant to imply you were an alcoholic. What I meant to say was that if there exists such an extreme potential for alcohol to have cross tolerance with benzos as in the case I sited, it would make sense that at even moderate dosages of alcohol there may be some similar effect going on. I've seen your posts before about MAOIs and you've mentioned beer several times so I assume that you drink some. I extrapolated that and tried to point out that even moderate alcohol consumption over long enough periods of time could contribute to the phenomenon that was presented in the paper and perhaps exhibited in yourself.

The literature from my brief googling seems pretty sparse on this question though. Here's a paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0091305792901102 examining cross tolerance of alcohol to benzos in mouse models and they found rapid cross tolerance. As for the measures they used, it's about 230mL of alcohol for a person weighing 200 pounds so not particularly extreme numbers here.

I dunno. Maybe it's something completely different but it seems like an interesting phenomenon at the least.
 
#27 ·
I never meant to imply you were an alcoholic. What I meant to say was that if there exists such an extreme potential for alcohol to have cross tolerance with benzos as in the case I sited, it would make sense that at even moderate dosages of alcohol there may be some similar effect going on.

I didn't start drinking till I was in my 30s, so it's not like there was long-term use of alcohol before 2003 when I started on high-dose Xanax therapy which failed.

I've seen your posts before about MAOIs and you've mentioned beer several times so I assume that you drink some. I extrapolated that and tried to point out that even moderate alcohol consumption over long enough periods of time could contribute to the phenomenon that was presented in the paper and perhaps exhibited in yourself.
I haven't consumed beer in the last couple of years. (Wine is a more calorie-efficient way to get alcohol, while beer has massive calories from carbs and I sure don't need more weight.)

I've often referred to how MAOI users can't drink tap beer, but can consume all the beer in bottles & cans that they want to point out how grossly exaggerated the dietary restrictions are. I also speak of fava beans, which I can't eat -- though I'd first need to know what the hell a fava been is!
 
#30 ·
my dosages to feel some effect from benzos:
clonazepam 10mg
lormetazepam 6mg
delorazepam 4mg
triazolam 750mcg
 
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