DOSE: T+ 0:00	60 mg	oral	Codeine	(pill / tablet)
T+ 0:30	60 mg	oral	Codeine	(pill / tablet)
T+ 1:30	120 mg	oral	Codeine	(pill / tablet)
T+ 2:10	60 mg	oral	Codeine	(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I'll start with the usual prelude; I am a fairly seasoned drug user having explored most major areas of recreational drugs. For the latter part of my teenage years and for all of my adult life I have been a stoner, this has been supplemented with different phases of MDMA, cocaine, benzos, ketamine and shrooms, but it is always weed that I come back to. During this time I have managed to successfully get through university with good grades, maintain an alright physical job in maintenence, and I am now undertaking a postgrad degree and have been scoring very high grades (turns out I get philosophy).

Anyway, around a year ago my boss offered my some codeine phosphate at work when I was experiencing a migraine. Knowing its potential for recreational use I took the pills from her but kept them for a later date, this was my first proper codeine experience and at 120mg for a first dose I felt incredible. When my old boss retired she left behind a couple of hundred 30mg codeine/500mg paracetamol tablets which I managed to save from being thrown in the trash with the rest of her stuff. Over the spring of 2018 I slowly gobbled my way through these, I found the addictive potential to be very high, but with a limited supply I managed to ration the pills so that I wasn't taking them every week, avoiding what I've heard to be a nasty withdrawal.

I forgot about codeine until this winter when one of my friends offered me some , and then the familiar feeling of warmth and comfort was back. I was convinced that this was the drug that would finally help me with social anxiety and stress (I have been through this process with benzos so I should really have seen the danger signs coming). Once my friend's supply ran dry I bit the bullet and bought my own pills, this time 60mg codeine phosphate pills.

It was these pills that forced me into an overdose. I will detail the timeline of that night, as I was shocked at quite how late after I took them that the overdose set in.

19.00: I am at the pub, rather than having a drink I decide to crack out the codeine and have one 60mg tab.

19.30 I am starting to feel warm and comfortable so take another 60mg tablet, I leave my partner at the pub and return home to enjoy the relaxation whilst my friends and partner get drunk.

20.30 By this point I am in a very familiar state of happiness but I decide to push it further, I thought I'd done enough research to find 240mg a safe dose so I take another two pills.

21.00 I am now feeling very blissed out, more so than normal, I play some piano and sing and I find the anxiety I usually have with my music has completely disappeared.

21.10 My partner calls to let me know she's coming home. She asks if I'd like to meet her outside the house to enjoy a walk through the city to end her night, so I say "yes" and take another 60mg tablet before leaving the house. This pushes my total codeine consumption to 300mg. During this time I have smoked one joint with about 0.25g of cannabis in it, some nice Stardawg.

21.35 I am feeling fucking amazing. I've always found codeine to be warm, but this was the first time I understood what it was like to be 'floating'. It felt like I glided home with my partner. For the next hour and a bit I felt great. I put on a good strategy game on the Pc, got some nice tunes going and set myself up for a nice slow night.

23.00 Now I began to feel sick. Fine I thought, I'd heard about people feeling nauseous from opioids but I never had myself, so I assumed that this was just my codeine limit. I thought that if I could puke I'd probably feel okay again, and then have a lie down. This did not happen. I couldn't get myself to puke so I walked back to my bed and passed out on the way from the toilet to the bedroom bruising my face badly as I fell. I woke up with my partner screaming and I was very confused but still very slow and calm. As I stood up I noticed how blue my lips were in the mirror and that my breathing was very very laboured.

23.05 I got myself into bed and all I wanted to do was sleep, but every time I nodded off my breathing would get slower and slower so I wrapped a cold cloth around my head to stay awake and forced myself to concentrate on breathing. My limbs were all very twitchy and would periodically spasm for a few seconds. This continued for an hour until midnight at which point I no longer had to focus on breathing.

I have experienced panic attacks before, and I have managed to convince myself that I had overdosed before but this was the real thing. My lungs were just not doing what I told them to do, there was a complete disconnect between my brain and my body. It was fucking scary and I genuinely thought that this was the end. I can't quite explain how bizarre it is to feel like I'm about to die, but to be completely at peace with this on some level because of how fucked up I was. In retrospect this is terrifying and I am lucky that my partner supported my through it.

I honestly think if she hadn't been there I would not have realised what was happening and I would be dead.

I'm not going to pretend that I'll never do codeine again, cause I will, but I've learnt a very valuable lesson in dosing, and i will never go over more than 200mg in the space of 6 hours.

Exp Year: 2019	ExpID: 112962
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Jul 7, 2019	Views: 6,557
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Codeine (14) : General (1), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Overdose (29), Health Problems (27), Small Group (2-9) (17)