JustSo

Hey so what job did your wife do at the police department anyway?

I had a light bitter chuckle reading the conclusion of this story.

Then I hit the comments. I don't think I've been this entertained in days.

ME COMRADE! I SHALL READ THEM!

Well shit, nicely done! Looks so good.

I think his story is plausible and you shouldn't assume he lied about having a benzo habit. After re-reading my other reply I feel like I might have written in such a way as to lead to that conclusion.

If his body and brain were totally benzo-naive and he was dosed without his knowledge, anything is possible really- if somebody put a huge dose in a drink early in the night he could have crashed off it and had the seizure.

Also worth considering that he could have hit his head on the way down from drinking too heavily or from being drugged while drinking. I assume they scanned for a concussion and ruled it out but who knows?

At the moment my usage varies a lot, I'm in a strange situation where I appear to be fairly tolerant to both benzos and their withdrawal, so I seem to be getting away with wildly fluctuating dosing.

However, I would say on average in the past month my usage has hovered between 2mg to 4mg alprazolam (xanax) equivalent. Note however that I am not using alpraz, I'm using a different obscure benzo, and equivalency charts only tell about half the story with more complex benzodiazepines. The current drug I am using does not produce much euphoria and is very sedative in its action (at least for me.) I have also been drinking to excess fairly regularly, the combo makes me impulsive and unpredictable with my doses, but this particular drug's long half-life and the experience I have with quitting means I don't think I'm going to Find Out after all this Fucking Around, I hope.

At my worst, I was taking easily 30mg xanax equivalent (or literally xanax) per day. Sometimes up to 60mg I think. Real reckless shit. At the point where I went through a managed benzo taper my tolerance was so high that I had to crash down to a lower dose to receive the maximum that would be prescribed to me without hospitalisation or institutionalisation. That was off some exotic high potency shit. That taper started at 120mg of valium per day and I was still pretty fuckin tense.

Today is a day where I have decided to ease off the throttle though. We'll see if I can keep that going for the entire day. I have also opted to have a friend prepare my liquid solution at periodically decreasing levels of concentration for the last couple of weeks and have asked that it be done subtly but without my knowledge of exactly what ratio the solution is mixed at so that I don't run the numbers and bypass my current taper progress which I'm just doing by volume of solution consumed.

I'm definitely addicted but the overall dose is fairly low / within my comfort zone for being able to get off the shit again. I am tired of being tired and weak.

In general the sooner you stop daily dosing, the earlier you intervene, the quicker you will recover. I'm glad your usage didn't get any further out of control or extended, if you quit cold turkey with a serious dependence you are entering brain damage territory. Definitely do research if you ever find yourself using these drugs again, as a rule you should never just stop completely.

Consider yourself super lucky, your partner was right to be concerned, but stopping daily usage after months is a pretty big gamble to take. I know it's hard though, with pressies, to divide up doses and taper effectively.

And congratulations on stopping. The initial withdrawal period is definitely unpleasant even when it's not life threatening. I'm proud of you for sticking the landing.

Hmm.

That's a simple sounding question with complex answers. A big dose of benzos can definitely knock you out and mixing benzos with alcohol is a real recipe for blackout disasters. Both drugs reduce inhibition. Benzos have definitely been used to drug people for SA or other types of abuse.

It would seem unlikely, according to my knowledge, that benzos alone or even benzos and alcohol would produce a seizure while under the influence if he was otherwise neurologically healthy.

Seizures with benzos tend to happen when you are chemically dependent on them and withdraw suddenly or taper too rapidly. The seizure that damaged my friend's brain was from unmanaged withdrawal. I believe I too have had very mild seizures during withdrawals.

To speculate, but not to presume:

If he was using benzos without anyone's knowledge, and particularly if he had stopped using them, then alcohol can, as I understand it, precipitate acute withdrawal symptoms even after you have been weened off the drug for a while. Longer term benzo dependence tends to result in something called post-acute withdrawal syndrome. You could look that up if you're curious about the various issues associated with it, but I believe you can be neurologically vulnerable during that time, so it's plausible that some binge drinking could trigger a seizure.

I think it's also possible that the drug test inaccurately classified something as a benzodiazepine, but that's stepping well outside my knowledge area. Just that I know sometimes drug tests will pick up on metabolites (the shit your body converts a chemical into) and will then classify that as a positive test for the most likely drug to produce that metabolite. In an era of research chemicals / drug analogs being sold as other drugs, I believe drug testing can sometimes be a bit "outdated" so to speak, and over generalise the results.

I would not rule out that he was drugged without knowledge or consent. He may have had a paradoxical reaction or had a condition that predisposed him to react badly to whatever could have been given to him with or without his knowledge.

I may have further thoughts on this later. I shall contemplate.

Yes. I was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety at the same time I was diagnosed as trans at the very end of my teenage years.

Finding benzos, particularly valium, felt like I had found a complete solution to fixing all the things that held me back in life and like it allowed me to shine and be myself and free to explore the world and to socialise, etc. I would call this the honeymoon phase, it was on and off use and I felt basically in control. During that phase I don't believe I was addicted and managed to stop entirely when my supply ran out without any real issues. I was lucky at that point and should have taken the experiences I'd had during that time and learned to aim for that sort of mental state through better self management and self knowledge.

Things turned darker a while later, basically when bulk xanax / alprazolam arrived in my life and I was reunited with my "wonder drug" - but the amount I was using and abusing, the delusions of sobriety, impulsive redosing, confusing self medication with recreation and visa versa, etc etc, it led to a lot of problems and acts of foolishness. Things got out of control and into addiction very quickly.

While I was clean and sober (at least 18+ months) after the worst years of my addiction, the anxiety I felt was orders of magnitude worse than the anxiety I was trying to fix originally. I realised how naive I had been to consider my natural level of anxiety to be as debilitating as I thought it was. I was also uneducated in trauma and cPTSD at that point so I really had no comprehension of why I was the way I was, why I am predisposed to these mental traps and the easy chemical remedies.

I have strategies now and, I believe, a much better understanding of myself, so I am fairly hopeful that the next time I get clean I will be able to cope and function much better, but I could have saved myself and the people around me a lot of chaos and pain if I had just taken the time to learn how to manage anxiety properly in the first place without the chemical crutch.

Any comment from the based department? I feel like this is based department territory.

lol

Has the .gov turned about on their Rust recommendation yet because woke? I shall continue cackling until I am starved to death by supply chain collapse.

Did you freestyle it or did you follow a recipe? Silken tofu or one of the firmer varieties?

I really miss cooking with tofu and 2025 I'm bringing it back to my diet. I'm working towards vegetarianism and probably ultimately veganism cuz I just feel so much better when I cook ethically and intentionally.

And because the vegan hardliners are objectively correct and have ethical superiority. I wish to join them as soon as I can figure it out and keep myself and my people properly fed and all of that while being basically a fuckup, creature of habit, filthy carnist and constantly fearing a relapse into ED.

Hahahaha.

Okay little guy.