Becomes More Difficult With Age | the Fortnightly Safety Factor

[andrew]

... so even once a week can keep you unstable for work, two is best.

use biweekly for best and optimal physiological response - in other words, using once a fortnight presents ONLY the risk of OD if you use opiates and don't fully understand the mechanism that is tolerance

even for the opiate naive user, using once ONLY biweekly (or a single 24 hr. window or "session" every 14 days) prevents addiction from developing into a physical dependence [thus maintaining your opiate naive status] !

can it be done ? for along as YOU wish to remain the one IN-CONTROL and stick with it.

highly recommended for stimulant users, too.

consider moving from injecting to smoking if your venous options are sad.

[gauchoamigo]

OK, so first of all, you begin "...so", which supposes that there was an ongoing conversation/debate and that what follows is a continuation of something.
Of what exactly?
This appears to follow something 'understood',  which I am unable to work out exactly from the post's content but would SEEM to refer to people who have been using (what exactly? Heroin hydrochloride/citrate? Oxy? Morphine salts?)
Your notions regarding time are not clear - biweekly, to me, means TWICE PER WEEK. If I meant every two weeks I'd say 'fortnightly'. Similar would be 'biannual': twice in the year, and 'biennial': occurring EVERY TWO YEARS.
Confusion (I am not quite at the senile/vascular dementia stage yet... I am merely a young thing of 58!
***
I have used opiates both clinically and recreationally now for a month or two short of FORTY YEARS, and will agree that withdrawal symptoms are progressively more difficult to handle as the years fly by. And this with, certainly in the UK, plummeting purity levels in heroin despite the record harvests of recent years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, falling prices (lowest cost in real terms that heroin has ever been) & the increasing difficulty finding 100% pure freeze-dried heroin hydrochloride vials of powder for reconstitution; in particular the 100mg and 500mg strength vials, now made by only a couple of firms here - Auralis seem to be most common, as they make the 10mg tablets and all strengths of Rx heroin powder, and are distributed via the Teva network of distributors, like the Martindal DF118 brand 40mg dihydrocodeine tartrate and Genus brand 2.5mg  lorazepam.
I don't know where you are located, Andrew, or your doctor's policies on prescribing of heroin - usually only on recommendation of use of the IM route, not IV - or what manner of illicit opiates and opioids do the street rounds wherever that might be, but here in my area (Scotland Central) the quality/purity of Afghan #3 heroin base, made for smoking, not injection or insufflation, has never been worse since it first began to appear in around 1981, eventually all but replacing the previously ubiquitous and wonderful "Double-U Globe" branded grey/white #4 hydrochloride from Khun Sa's Cambodia/Thailand/Burma/Lao operation, which had kept the UK non-pharmaceutical 'scene' going for mamy years; almost nothing else was ever seen and brown smoking heroin was an absolute rarity.
I remember thinking I had been ripped off first time I encountered Afghani #3 until told how it should be taken and shown the foil method (which I had used previously in the absence of an opium pipe. When opium was a hell of a lot easier to find imported rather than having to plant stands all over the place and harvest one's own Hen and Chicks and Persian Whites) but in that 30+ years I haven't ever come to terms with the increasing greed of UK distributors who feed the streets with the poorest opiate to be found anywhere on earth, cut with acetaminophen, caffeine, lactose and dextro-mannitol until it is rare now to find anything that stops pain or even feels good - I feel that for 20 years I was merely spending money to make myself feel normal.
Now, I would never touch heroin base (or HCl) from a dealer in the UK. Apart from the user demographic  changing to such a massive extent, (when I first started buying heroin, it was all Khun Sa's and users and vendors all in their late 40s or older - I was an extremely rare younger user then; the teens and twenties only really began to use AFTER the 'changeover' from HCl to base, bringing with them the Thatcherite economics of lower quality and lower weight equals higher profits and F*CK the consumer....
I acquire mine now on a weekly basis from Iran, Macedonia and people in other EU countries who sell product as from the producer. I see no point in paying almost GBP £200 per quarter ounce (7g rather than 7.12g though) & prefer to shell out a little more for what I know will be a 5g bag capable of keeping me well medicated ALL WEEK, actually nodding most of my leisure away, certainly not lining the pockets of these British thieves, vagabonds and profiteers who could not care less what a junkie puts into his/her body; almost all problems connected with this relatively benign drug are due to the attitude of suppliers here. For the first time since the Vietnam days, the USA has got far higher quality street heroin than the UK. And having bought, just to see, some Mexican heroin recently, one bag of 'black tar' (which looks and acts a bit like opium rather than heroin) & one of 'Gunpowder', which as the name suggests, looks like a dark grey powder which has not been compressed to a very high degree, like a poorly pressed Afghan #3, I can also say they too are more 'smoking heroin' than powder for injection, and the few grams I got were surprisingly potent. I could bemoan the difficulties of acquiring acetic anhydride and its precursors in the Western Hemisphere, but the stuff, made using GAA, is certainly purer and a hell of a lot more recreational than ANYTHING available in the UK over the past 15 years anyway. Since the blighted crops of 2009 things here have never been worse yet anywhere in Northern Portugal one may buy Afghani which is way up the potency scale; Macedonia and the Balkans still have the best heroin on the continent though - assuming you buy from somebody BEFORE it reaches Kosovo, where quality begins to fall to current Western European levels, ie the absolute nadir of drugs. And I will never again buy locally unless there is such an emergency that I am left with no choice.

My actual point is that, having accepted that my addiction is lifelong, being prescribed OxyContin as well as my recreational social drug, the w/d syndrome (I am so badly underprescribed for my pain) @ 58-y-o is at least 10 x worse than when I was in my 30s and seems to appear after as little as 16 hours' abstinence; whereas I used to be able to get by without suffering too much by judicious use of 2 - 3 x 40mg DF118 tablets three or four times a day, I now have to ensure that I have a goodly supply of IR morphine sulphate tabs 60mg (Verve are the only company to make that strength, Bard/Napp SEVREDOL being 50mg and far too expensive, my doctor flatly refusing to prescribe them, even though I rant on a monthly basis about the low OC dosage and lack of rescue medications).
If one sets aside around £400 per month, one is quite able to get Afghan of a quality not far off "straight from the fields" if the vendor is right and you can arrange for those regular weekly deliveries; nobody should be paying a fortune for the sort of regular UK garbage from the greediest of profiteers simply to prevent vomiting and diarrhoea!
Yes, withdrawal gets progressively more difficult to handle with the passage of years, but real, good, potent and not-too-expensive Base is out there for your smoking pleasure (I have been unabke to inject for 20+ years now) if you can get your head around encryption and bitcoin trading.
Any other oldies resigned to a 'full life tariff' out there in d&u-Land?

[Chip]

Sorry, I meant that using drugs similiar to Heroin and Oxys once a forthright is safe and not bi-weekly.

I got my terms screwed up.

But we agree that is a reliable way to avoid a habit, yeah ?

[gauchoamigo]

Perhaps I wouldn't be as extreme as you; for many years I have known that a habit isn't as easily acquired as popular media &c. would have people believe. In fact, you have to work at getting a habit! I never experienced any kind of w/d until I had been using regularly for over five years!
My maxim is more along the lines of, "Never, if you wish to avoid a dependency, use morphine or diamorphine any more than two days in succession. Three days running is the point at which one begins to push one's luck".
It only takes 3-4 days to completely clear the system of most (exceptions being methadone-like, lipid-soluble compounds) opioids. Residual withdrawal symptoms will continue for another 4 days or so - however it is a manageable habit and a manageable withdrawal syndrome unlike the potentially life-threatening ones produced by dependence on benzodiazepines or barbiturates, though the worst and most dangerous* is the withdrawal from an alcohol habit.

I plan on publishing here on this board the "Gauchoamigo Guide to Safe and Comfortable Withdrawal from Recreational or Iatrogenic Opiate/oid Dependence", my perhaps OVER-careful but tried and tested method which extends the withdrawal period for the sake of a completely pain-free, stress-free and very comfortable withdrawal over 21 days. Nine of which are a standard Lofexidine course.

*10% of dependents who develop the most serious complication, delirium tremens, will die. The incidence of the terrible Korsakoff's Syndrome in those previously experiencing DTs has not been accurately quantified but is increased by a massive % age over those who have never actually been through clinical delirium.

[nick]

Sorry, I meant that using drugs similiar to Heroin and Oxys once a forthright is safe and not bi-weekly.

I got my terms screwed up.

But we agree that is a reliable way to avoid a habit, yeah ?

There is NO 100% safe way to use drugs.

This may(every habit starts with recreational use) help avoid addiction,BUT it also increases the chances of overdose.

[Chip]

There is NO 100% safe way to use drugs.

This may(every habit starts with recreational use) help avoid addiction,BUT it also increases the chances of overdose.

true but if you stick to some basics, you should be able to avoid a habit and an overdose.

don't use alone if you can help it.

[Pantopon Pete]

You Scots suuure hate Thatcher, huh?

Not that I blame you. Just an observation.