DrugBuyers.Com: Benzodiazepines, Addiction & Withdrawl

Over the past 3 months I've been sort of experimenting with Benzodizepines for what I would call 'temporary anxiety disorder' (basically GAD but caused by specific recent life events, I normally don't have anxiety or have ever gotten panic attacks) I did tons of research before trying these meds. I just wanted to try to give back to this board by documenting my experiences.

On the Benzos, I was careful to not take the short-acting ones (Xanax and Ativan) multiple times a day. My basic goal was to not get me in a situation where going cold turkey was going to have a high probability of experiencing seizures and really nasty withdrawl, even though I would never go cold turkey on these drugs, but you never know if you may find yourself in a siutation without access to them for a couple days. I basically would take 2 mg of Ativan during the day whenever I started feeling anxious/stressed. 90% of the time I never took more than one dose in 24 hours. I occassionally took 1mg of Xanax but I can confirm what other reports/people have stated about the 'rebound' effect of this drug. Because of the slower onset/offset and different pharmacology of the Ativan, I found if I skipped a day and didn't take anything the next day, I felt less stressed the day after taking the Ativan compared to having taken the Xanax the day before which actually made me feel unusually MORE stressed out the next day unless I took another dose. I feel very sorry for those people taking multiple doses of Xanax every day. That drug has HUGE dependence potential - scary stuff. (Not to say though the Ativan is THAT much better regarding the dependence/addiction potential.)

Every once in a while (maybe once a week) I'd take a valium in order to have sort of a low 'background' level of Benzos in my system which sort of helped round off the peaks and valleys of the inconsisent usage of the Ativan (and Xanax). It also provided additional protection from severe withdrawl symptoms if I didn't take the Ativan for a couple days. Overall, it seems the strategy has worked well. While I think this strategy would not provide enough relief for people with more severe generalized anxiety disorder, it was enough for me, and by keeping the doses low, being inconsistent and skipping a day here and there, not only have I found I can skip more than a day without feeling very significant withdrawl, but I've also minimized the build up of tolerance to these drugs so I don't have to gradually increase the dosage siginficantly. I did find towards the end my average dosage was slightly higher (.5mg or so on the Ativan, and maybe 5mg on the Valium) but that's all.

The thing that I find distressing though is all the messages I've read on this board about the horror stories of coming off these drugs. Most of them do not provide detailed information about their dosage regimen leading up to their battle of coming off them. I think most of them result in a typical regimen like minimum 1-2mg of Xanax 2-3 times a day, or 2-3mg Ativan 2-3 times a day. I can see how one could easily build up to those levels due to the tolerance. You really have to be diligent about your dosing to prevent that from happening and be willing to actually tolerate some of the anxiety/stress some of the time.

So I think the point I'm trying to make is that you can make effective use of these drugs without getting into trouble and without having to take decreasing dosages of Valium or Klonopin for several weeks to get off them. (Although when I decided to completely get off them, even though I didn't HAVE to, I did take small doses of valium every few days for a week or so just to be safe, basically 10mg the first day, 5 mg 2 days later, and then 2.5 mg 3 days later followed by 2.5 mg another 3 days later - worked really well for me, but most others would probably need to start at higher dosages if they had a higher dosage regimen prior to coming off them - CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR)

In general, my goal was to never ever take the drugs more often than their half life, preferably no more often than 2 times their half life. Xanax and Ativan have a half life of around 12-16 hours. The Ativan definitely seems to have longer lasting and more gradual effects. So at most I was taking a dose every 24 hours, so there was only a minimal amount of build up. The Valium has a half-life the varies with people metabolism, but I guessed my was about 50 hours or a little over 2-days. So I never took the valium more than once every 2-days. The other thing I did was try to take it as late in the day as possible. That way, when the drug had pretty much felt like it had almost worn off, I was in bed going to sleep so I was asleep for the next 8 hours as the drug left my system. I think taking it in the morning or even early afternoon, you could run into problem of feeling a little stressed in the evening and therefore having trouble getting to sleep.

Hope this information is useful to people using these drugs.