This is THE best video, hell.... mini-documentary, I've ever seen on opiates.
I say mini-documentary because in the short 3:49 video it gives the ACTUAL story of nearly every user I've ever met, including myself. This is the path that we all went down, to a T. Sure you may have started on darvocet, percocet, or oxycontin, but it's still all the same story.
So yeah, don't bother reading wikipedia all the night, the erowid experiences vault, or a 'real' documentary. Watch this.
Hell, I even SAID most of the stuff here at one point or another. I had serious depression issues (caused by body dysmorphic disorder for years before finding opiates) and while no medication ever worked, IT DID. It also didn't make me feel fucked up or do crazy shit. I was JUST happy. It (oxy at the time) made me MORE productive, I got off my ass and went outside, got a job, got a girl, for the first time in ages.
That's a hard thing to suddenly leave so I got on suboxone, in 2007, after making it nearly a week without oxy. I'm still on suboxone in 2015. Everyone, including doctors, is STILL ignorant about it but they REALLY were in 2007. It's both a miracle and terrifying since at least with heroin, for example, you probably will have at least 12 hours a day where you're not stimulating your receptors. With it's 36+ hour halflife I've literally been stimulating my receptors more than every second of every day for 8 years. In 12 hours I start to feel withdrawal symptoms when you aren't supposed to for about 36. This isn't surprising. What scares me the most is that the withdrawal is MUCH worse than heroin, despite being told it's like a 1/5th of the symptoms and is known to last a lot longer. We're talking 3 or 4 days of the acute physical withdrawal for heroin versus 1-2 weeks minimum for sthe acute with suboxone, and from reading online I often see people at 2 weeks who are JUST starting to feel a bit better. Oh yeah, did I mention that it's super common for people to still being having PAWS (post-acute withdrawal syndrome a.k.a RIDICULOUSLY life crushing depression) 6 months later? This isn't the life long cravings you'll have with any opiate, this is "I want to kill myself" type depression. .. and I already had this sort of depression BEFORE finding opiates.
Ugh. It makes me sad. Opiates. Natures depression killer AND depression maker.