Or don't. While a lot of people find grass relaxing, a lot of people (especially those who don't often smoke) can actually find it very anxiety inducing. Add this to the fact that when coming off an anxiolytic drug your anxiety threshold will be significantly lowered and this is a recipe for disaster for anyone not used to it.
Exactly how you're going to come off depends massively on how much, for how long and what you've been taking. Benzos can have massively different half lives and build ups.
In any case, the general advice is as follow:
- Obtain a benzo with a fairly high half life. You don't want something you're going to have to be topping up every couple of hours (you'll see why later). Diaz and Clonaz are good, Alpraz and Etiz are bad. This is tricky because it leaves you without any good legal options.
- When withdrawal symptoms appear start dosing up at the rate of one dosage unit per hour until you feel normal. This is then your 'standard dose' (what you need in your blood to feel normal). A dosage unit is whatever is equivalent to 10mg of diazepam.
- Your standard dose should be taken every day, split into three administrations one every 8 hours. This is why you want a long-acting benzo and not a fast acting one. Shorter action = more pills more often = higher tolerance = addiction gets worse. (Note: You split your standard dose into three, you do not take your standard dose three times a day).
- Each week reduce your standard dose by one dosage unit.
- Plenty of water, good food, exercise. No alcohol or other psychoactive drugs.
- Don't follow this protocol if withdrawal symptoms don't appear or if your daily usage was less than three dosage units a day (3mg alpraz, 1.5mg clonaz, 30mg diaz etc etc). Such low dose usage is very unlikely to result in severe withdrawal symptoms and any minor issues can be very easily dealt with using basic reasoning / dose reduction.
If I taper off too fast, am I likely to be left with ling lasting side effects? I am taprring off with etiz quite quickly and have had shakes and social anxiety and a lack of clarity of thought. Long walks, gym, fruit and calmness has helped.
The only known long-term effect of benzo/alcohol withdrawal is 'kindling'. This means that if you go through WDs once, you're more likely to suffer from WDs in the future, even from lesser amounts / duration of use. This effect is cumulative (the more WDs you have, the more the effect builds), and can actually build up to the point where alcoholics can have WDs and have to taper off from a single heavy night on the sauce.
The absolute amount of alcohol doesn't really matter, because everyone processes alcohol at a different rate. If you get withdrawal symptoms, then you're likely to experience kindling. If you've ever had the DTs or the shakes, then you're at risk.
I never reached 2 litres of vodka a day; about the worst that I got was five bottles of wine and still being utterly (subjectively) sober.
Withdrawal symptoms can occur after as a little as a few weeks of raised alcohol intake, and like >>6435 says, once you've had WD symptoms you are at risk of kindling.
>>6436 How severe before kindling kicks in? I don't go weeks with consistent alcohol intake but I binge for days from time to time. Am I still going to end up a wreck after a night out later in life?
It's a degenerative condition. Kindling is caused by withdrawal symptoms, but kindling makes future withdrawal symptoms worse, so it tends to be a vicious cycle. The more frequent and more severe your withdrawals, the more likely you are to experience kindling, which makes subsequent withdrawals more likely and more severe. If you're regularly going on multi-day binges that result in withdrawal symptoms, you're at high risk of developing kindling.
