Preamble
I wanted to write something similar to Stan's guide to SN but I hesitate to call this a guide because I can't in good conscience make a guide for something so unreliable in terms of access, lethality, and risk of permanent injury. I.e., traumatic brain injury from hypoxia. SN is a far more reliable and lower-risk alternative in this regard.
Indeed,
the PPH strongly recommends against opioids for these reasons.
However, many will still seek to ctb using opioids due to reasons of accessibility, their notoriety for taking lives in the current overdose epidemic, and/or their well-known status as euphoriants and painkillers. The PPH does not go into details about how to ctb with opioids and overlooks different routes of administration and available drug checking services that can inform people on what is in their drugs.
The major benefit of opioids is that if successfully performed, death will be guaranteed to be peaceful, and perhaps even enjoyable for some. At face-value opioids would
seem like an attractive method for this reason alone. But, I encourage spending some time forming an unbiased/neutral assessment of both the risks and benefits of this method, before making a decision.
The goal of this thread is twofold:
- Help some to reconsider this method due to its poor reliability and risks of permanent injury/disability.
- Provide information to improve reliability and minimize risk for permanent injury/disability for those who choose this method anyways.
- **Even following the methods in this thread, opioid poisoning remains very unreliable due to variability in personal tolerance and uncontrollable factors related to drug quality.
Introduction
This thread is dedicated to compiling and discussing information on the method of opioid poisoning. Please feel free to comment with any additional information or recommended edits/criticisms to this post.
What are Opioids?
Opioids are analgesic (pain-relieving) drugs that, in high enough doses, result in death via respiratory depression. Examples include morphine, heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone (AKA Percocet or Oxycontin), hydrocodone, hydromorphone (AKA Dilaudid), codeine (AKA T3s), tramadol, and many others.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Nearly guaranteed to be peaceful, if successful
- Accessible for people with pre-existing sources/dealers
- Non-violent
- Can easily be portrayed as "accidental", especially if one already uses drugs
Cons
- Low to moderate reliability
- Risk of permanent damage; traumatic injury, organ failure, etc.
- Non-accessible for people without pre-existing sources/dealers or access to dark net
- Reduced reliability for people with tolerance to opioids (e.g., from pre-existing opioid use)
- Unpredictable: significant variance in effects from person to person (genetic/etc.-related tolerance & sensitivity)
How Do Opioids Work to Induce Death? What Does it Feel Like?
Opioid drugs bind to the opioid receptors in the brain which are the brain's primary pain-killing receptors. At high enough doses, this causes the nervous system to become depressed to a point where the brain stops sending signals to the lungs to breathe. This results in hypoxic death from lack of oxygenated blood to the brain and body. By the time of fatal respiratory depression, the person's brain will have been flooded with pain-killing signals and will also be completely unconscious (likened to a state of general anaesthesia); they will not experience any suffering.
Prior to losing consciousness, opioids can cause feelings of contentment, relaxation, euphoria, a warm and pleasurable feeling in the body, and has generally been described as being cozied up in a blanket beside a fire. Many people experience a cold flush and/or nausea and vomiting, especially their first time using opioids. Vomiting is not an issue for the effectiveness of ctb if the opioids were not consumed orally, but may be uncomfortable for some. Notably, the pleasurable opioid effects often make people indifferent to nausea. In some cases, intravenous injection may result in such rapid onset of effects that blackout occurs almost immediately, bypassing the pleasurable effects.
Which Opioids are Considered Best For CTB?
In short, heroin or fentanyl are ideal.
Stronger opioids such as heroin, fentanyl, or oxycodone are generally preferable as other types of opioids require much larger doses and thus have higher risk of failure. For example, heroin is about 10x as strong as morphine.
Pharmaceutical-grade opioids might be considered preferable by some given that their dosages are accurately labelled and they are not potentially contaminated or sold as different drugs entirely like with illegal markets. However, many pharmaceutical opioids also contain high concentrations of anti-inflammatory drugs such as paracetamol, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen (e.g., Percocet) that are likely to cause significant stomach pain and damage organs in the doses required to ctb. They also often contain fillers (e.g., Oxycontin) that make them unsuitable for injection or other routes of administration. Eating these medications is also not recommended as it is very likely to fail due to vomiting and oral bioavailability is low.
I highly recommend against using weak opioids like codeine, tramadol, or hydromorphone (dilaudid) as they are far too weak to reliably ctb.
I also recommend against research chemical opioids as too little is known about them to reliably ctb and the risk for pain, adverse effects, etc. is high.
Where Can I Get Opioids?
As mentioned above, some people get them by prescription, but most people will opt for heroin or fentanyl which are rarely prescribed. Illicit opioids can be found by contacting a dealer on the street or sourcing them via the dark net. See:
How to Access Dark Net Markets for Ctb Resources or download tor browser and look up the Dark Net Market Buyer's Bible which you can find a .onion link for on the
https://tor.taxi/ directory (.onion links in this directory can only be accessed using the tor browser).
Street drugs may be more accessible for some, but tend to be much more contaminated with other drugs and have significant variability in concentrations. Fentanyl, for example, tends to vary from around 5-25% concentration in a given sample. It is often cut with caffeine, benzodiazepines, cocaine, heroin, paint thinners, even concrete, and a range of other drugs.
This webpage shows data on common cuts and buffs in the opioid supply, demonstrating how unreliable quality sourcing is off the street.
Dark net markets tend to have higher quality drugs due to their review system which adds some (but far from perfect) level of accountability. The gold star method would involve sourcing from a vendor with a long track record of positive reviews combined with utilizing drug-checking services (see below). China white #4 heroin is advisable.
The Importance of Checking Your Drugs
Because the drug supply on the street and dark net markets are heavily contaminated and inconsistently dosed, it is important to get your drugs checked using harm reduction services such as
Energy Control (EU; possibly worldwide) or
Get Your Drugs Tested (Canada) to determine
approximate concentrations, to confirm the presence of your expected opioid, and to rule out the presence of other drugs. Some jurisdictions have local services where you can get your drugs checked legally, anonymously, and confidentially in-person.
*Energy Control has
confirmatory chromatography testing meaning they can tell you more precise information without the limitations below. They should be able to tell you the exact concentration. Try to figure out if the service you use utilizes confirmatory/chromatography testing or an FTIR machine.
*Important: The FTIR spectroscopy technology used by Get Your Drugs Tested and many similar organizations has some limitations:
- It can only detect concentrations within a margin of error that is around 10%. I.e., Results will usually say, for example "between 40-50% heroin". Some organizations prefer not to share concentrations unless explicitly asked.
- It can only detect the presence of drugs that are above 5% concentration within the sample. There could be multiple other drugs present in a given sample below the 5% detection limit.
- The "chocolate chip cookie effect": it can only detect what is in the portion of the sample you send them; just like in a cookie if you break off a chunk, there may or may not be chocolate chips in the chunk. Some drugs tend to clump together and won't be present in the "chunk" you send for testing. Grinding your sample to ensure it is a homogeneous mixture before mailing a portion may reduce this risk.
Fentanyl test strips can also be accessed online and via many pharmacies. However, they will only detect the
presence of fentanyl and provide no information on concentrations. Plenty of fentanyl samples are massively under-dosed so fentanyl test strips alone are insufficient.
The Method
Now that you have sourced your opioid of choice, determined its relative concentration and ruled out the presence of other drugs, you need to ensure the right amount enters your body the right way.
Dose
A lethal dose of heroin for a person without any tolerance is technically 30mg. For fentanyl, it is considered 3mg. However, it is unlikely your sample will be 100% pure or even close to it. These doses are also on the lower end of the spectrum and will only be lethal in a proportion of people. A more conservative/reliable aim is at least 150mg for heroin and 15mg for fentanyl.
You will need to do some math based on the relative concentrations provided by the drug checking services you accessed previously. If you have a gram (1,000mg) of powder with a concentration/purity of 10-20% fentanyl, this means there is between 100-200mg of fentanyl in the gram of powder.
Here's an example of the math for a 500mg sample that has a concentration of 30-40% heroin:
500mg x 0.3 (30%) = 150
500mg x 0.4 (40%) = 200
Therefore, 500mg of 30-40% heroin will contain between 150-200mg of heroin. It is recommended to dose conservatively to ensure that the lower end of the range includes the lethal dose.
If you have any tolerance to opioids, this will also reduce the method's reliability further as you will have to do some guesswork to increase your dose accordingly. Erring on the side of caution by taking a larger dose will improve reliability.
Regarding Polydrug Poisoning & Potentiation
Some may wish to combine their opioid with other depressants which can potentiate the effects of opioids, making them more lethal. This is not necessary if you have a large enough dose of opioids but doesn't hurt to improve reliability or if the dose of opioids itself is too small to ctb on its own. The drugs below potentiate the effects of opioids meaning each individual drug has its own effect, but there is an additional effect due to the interaction between these drugs (almost like a 3rd effect on top of the individual effects of the 2 drugs). Potentiation will make the opioid more lethal by causing respitatory failure with a lower dose.
*Important: Although potentiating small doses of opioids with depressants will increase its reliability, it is still very unreliable compared to just using a high dose of opioids. Ideally one would use a sufficiently large dose of opioids in the first place and the addition of sedatives will only be included as a fail-safe.
Potentiating drugs that can be included are below:
-
Benzodiazepines (e.g., Xanax (alprazolam), Klonopin (clonazepam), etizolam, Ativan (lorazepam), Valium (diazepam), etc. Benzodiazepines are drugs that reduce anxiety and cause sedation and relaxation. The combination has become increasingly associated with overdose deaths as dealers are cutting the fentanyl supply with benzodiazepines to make them feel stronger. The current supply of fentanyl in Canada witnesses around half of samples containing benzodiazepines. Check your drugs with the services above so you know whether yours contains benzodiazepines.
-
Alcohol
-
Z-drugs such as zolpidem (ambien) or zopiclone. Z-drugs are commonly prescribed for insomnia/as sleeping pills.
Route of administration (ROA)
The two ideal ROAs are intravenous injection and rectal administration. Other options are less ideal for the reasons described below.
Injections are preferable for anyone who has experience using needles or those willing to learn. Just make sure you draw visible blood into the syringe before pushing the plunger down, and don't hit an artery. Use sterile needles. 30-31 gauge syringes are provided no-questions-asked at most pharmacies or can be obtained online. More detailed instructions on preparing your shot can be found with a quick google search. I recommend following all harm reduction protocols (except "start low, go slow - for obvious reasons) such as sanitary procedure, in case of ctb failure or abort. I know the risk may seem trivial, but you don't want to fail ctb only to be hospitalized and in pain due to a serious blood infection.
Rectal administration is the second most effective method as it has high bioavailability and is suitable for those who wish to skip the stress (or potential phobia) of needles. All you need is a small oral syringe, some water, and some lube for your bum hole. It is marginally less reliable as absorption will be slightly slower.
This guide is great for detailing how to do it.
*Note: regarding the homophobia/stigma of men penetrating their butts with a syringe, it
does make you gay. That's the best part! Jokes aside, straight men all over the world insert things in their butts to consume drugs (recreational, suppositories, to die),
and sexual pleasure. There would be a lot less of us on this forum if not for homophobia… Show your support for us queer folk by dying with heroin up your arse <3
Oral administration is not suitable as it has a low bioavailability and vomiting is incredibly likely. Anti-emetics can be used, but this ROA is still inadvisable due to slow absorption/poor bioavailability. Snorting is also not recommended as absorption can be slow and is effected by the amount of powder in your nostrils; the more powder, the slower the absorption. It is also less bioavailable than injection or rectal administration.
Regarding Naloxone/Suicide Reversal
I feel compelled to advise people on how naloxone works in case anyone should want it by their side. Although most of us aim to ctb without potential for hesitation or reversal, cases where people will consume their lethal dose by whatever means and regret it or contact help are not out of the question.
Should you wish to have a means of reversal (up until the point where you cannot move your body or notify others for help; this will occur very quickly in most cases), naloxone is an effective reversal agent. Naloxone kits usually come with 3 vials and 3 syringes. You may wish to prepare the naloxone by drawing it into the syringes in advance in case you change your mind last minute.
There is nothing wrong with changing your mind.
*Injection use of opioids will provide less/potentially no opportunity for reversal as the onset is so quick one may blackout immediately. Rectal administration will take place in approximately 5 minutes after adminstration.
You should dose yourself with at least 2 or more doses as you will have taken a dose that is likely considerably larger than what most people overdose on. If comfortable, contact emergency services after dosing the naloxone as it has a short half-life and when it wears off the opioid effects can cause you to collapse and die later on. If you aren't comfortable contacting emergency services, consider getting 2 or more naloxone kits so you can dose yourself repeatedly until certain the opioid effects have worn off.
Naloxone works by kicking the opioid off your brain's opioid receptor. You can access naloxone kits legally and confidentially at most local pharmacies. It is relatively intuitive to use and will not harm you in any way; it has virtually no interactions with other drugs. You will feel sober afterwards and that is about it.
Final words
I figured I would write this post while I wait my SN to be delivered. I hope this post serves as a way of giving back to this community for what it has provided for me. Thank you to those operating this site, the mods, and contributing members. I'll stick around for a bit to edit this post as needed.
Thanks to
@zel for inspiring me to write this.
With love in finding peace in living or dying,
Rhizo