I have a few friends who are addicted to opiates, and I was thinking about ways to help them.
My idea was to give them ayahuasca to make them more aware of what this is doing to them, and then give them kratom to ease their withdraws.
I had planned on doing it pharmahuasca style because it seems easier to convince them to swallow a few capsules than to drink nasty brown water.

I'm just not sure on a few things and was wondering if anyone has advice on this sort of thing.
Is this a good idea? (considering I'm sure some of them haven't even tried anything psychedelic) I would be absolutely sure I don't give them too strong of a dose, and also that they completely understand what they are taking. If so, what order should it be done in? I was thinking ayahuasca right off the bat, then once it wears off begin using kratom as needed. Would more than one ayahuasca session be better? Any info on this is appreciated.

PS - if any of you still remember me, I'm still alive and miss you guys!

I think it is a good idea. However, a substance is not enough to remove such a powerful addictive substance like opiates. Spiritual techniques: yoga, kundalini, meditation, and even excersising imho, etcetera... if they get into that, the chance of getting back to old addiction habits are minimalised. People revert back to opiates after Iboga ceremonies, and even brawl how it does not help to overcome the addiction... diamorphine is the fastest to get "instinctual" for a human being, and most harmful as well. Person have to want and try hard to stop it.

P.S. People use small doses of opium to aid meditation, opium is a totally different thing, more like cannabis. So, you maybe use this information, good luck.

I would HIGHLY advise you do not co-administer Ayahuasca preparations with Kratom. Many opiates have been noted to produce harmful (& sometimes lethal) effects when combined with MAOI drugs. Giving opiate addicts (some of whom having never tried psychedelics) ayahuasca and kratom with no legitimate medical oversight is a recipe for disaster and destruction.

No. This is not a good idea. It is a recipe for disaster which is guaranteed to inflict harm on you and your friends. Your Original Post and ideas read as though they were concocted by a kindergartner on acid, naively playing with powers, potions, pathologies and potential poisons, blindly believing in the unfounded propaganda praising psychedelics as though they were panaceas. Before any further thought is put into this, I HIGHLY suggest you abandon this childish idea, and read Frankenstein alongside the bodies of literature documenting the grave consequences of this naive Promethean fantasy of yours.

I'm being brutally honest with you. I cannot shout and scream and hoot and holler enough about how horrible such an idea as this is. In fact, I beseech you to saturate this idiotic idea with kerosene, light a match, burn it out of your mind's eye ASAP, and move onto better things, such as reading Frankenstein and not giving opiate addicts with little to no experience with psychedelics Ayahuasca and kratom. To quote Mrs. Garrison, There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.



As an aside, I wrote a 20-something page paper for a graduate level psychopharmacology course on the use of Kratom as an alternative, easily accessible, affordable, more effective and safer chemotherapeutic agent for the treatment of opioid-ergic drug addiction and dependency than methadone or buprenorphine; whilst collecting 30-50-odd references for said paper, I noted that the majority of first hand accounts of using kratom for this purpose were successful (with the exception of a few cases of severe opioid dependency & tolerance, such as a 300+ mg / day oxycodone or diamorphine habit). Unlike methadone or buprenorphine, which have ~60 hour half lives and take months, if not years, to taper-off opiates, Kratom's active alkaloids have a larger volume of distribution & clearance, alongside a much shorter half life, thus allowing for easier and faster tapering off opiates. To pop a cherry on top, many recovering and/or ex opiate addicts noted that the PAWS from Kratom was a cakewalk when compared with most other opioid-ergic drugs. I would hypothesize that helping your friends switch from their opiates of choice to kratom, as well as being there to provide moral support if/when they chose to taper-off of kratom/opiates with minimal PAWS may be a safer option than mixing ayahuasca with kratom and expecting them to "see the error of their ways" whilst increasing their risk of a seizure, trauma, fatalities and/or other serious, potentially permanent, impairments to their psychological and physical health and well-being, which would be very likely to occur should one make the mistake of mixing these two medicines, as it can result in a cornucopia of major drug-drug interactions. If you really want to help them, I'd suggest you educate them about Kratom for maintenance and tapering therapy to treat their addiction/dependency to opiates, and let them blaze their own trail. Helping them cultivate mindfulness practices may be more beneficial for their health than a cocktail of Ayahuasca con Kratom.

Dont mix em tho.
Use the kratom to keep the crave to a minimum.
Use aya for hard resets. Dont think its really needed.
But still real treatment is miles better than just throwing other drugs at them.

Also godsmacker how about a chill pill?
He never even said he is gonna mix em.
He said he was gonna use both like i did.

thats also just plain wrong
opium is not hydrocodone or heroin thats true.
But its still a blend of codeine and morphine and other opiods that are the base for production of semi synthetics like heroin. And imo codeine and morphine are still bad enough. (Lean and morhpine make ppl addicted too)
Dont forget what the brits did to the chinese using only opium.

Hey Godsmacker, I think you need to read this
Thanks for looking out but that was quite a douchey response considering I specifically said how I wanted to try it and that they wouldn't be mixed. Also have no clue what you mean by it being "guaranteed to inflict harm on you and your friends". I don't think ayahuasca has a 100% harm rate, and I'm not the one even taking it.
Also my idea of this is to research how people get help professionally, and try to recreate that. Harm reduction and healing has always been something I wanted to get involved in. However DMT and kratom are both illegal where I live, so I wanted to take a shot at getting people as close as they can get here to professional help, not necessarily telling them "take these other drugs too and you'll be fine!"

I think that the first question is do your friends want to get off of opiates? Another is how long do you intend to be the administerer in this process?

In my experience opiate cessation is a long drawn out affair. If i was in your shoes and wanting to undertake this kind of task, i would take my addicted friends to a house way out in the country for a year with enough dmt/ayahuasca products and enough of what ever drug they were choosing to taper off with.
I would start of by dosing them small amounts of DMT and see how they dealt with it and then ramp it up if i thought that things were going in an agreeable way. We would all be involved in physical activities during the day like DIY, gardening and wood chopping. And have some kind of art therapy. Music , painting and stuff like that.

I feel that the above kind approach could work. And if it doesn't, we spent a year in a house in the country tripping and trying to kick drugs. There's gotta some stories in that scenario that would be worth telling the grand kids.

If it is one eye opening session and then a week or so reducing kratom intake, i don't think that it will work. For me the length of the taper is very important.

I could be wrong but i think that this "i took ayahuasca or iboga and i was cured at the end of my 2 week stay at such and such a retreat" story is an exaggeration designed to cater for a society that has somehow lost the ability to be patient and wants everything NOW...

But i do not have any experience of kratom.

Are your friends looking for a way out of opiate addiction themselves? If not, there is nothing that will convince them. Not aya, not an overdose, not anything.

If they are, I can say that I know one person very well that finally ended a 25 year addiction (love affair for the first 10 years) with opiates with aya and kratom specifically. He had already made the initial decision that it just wasn't working any more and had been on methadone for about a year when he had his first successful aya, and he started dropping dose the very next day. Smoked DMT during the year dropping dose blasted away all the self-deceptions that allowed the opiate life defense mechanism to work. Kratom gave him the cushion necessary to get off the methadone completely once his dose was low.

That being said, this is not for the faint of heart. My friend is about 4 years out from that initial aya, and this journey of healing with psychedelics has brought him into himself and his past in ways both magical and tremendously painful. Take that into consideration, as the psychs won't just show them that opiates are wrong, they'll show them all the terrible shit that was done to them and that they did that made that life seem the best solution to a painful world.

I feel like that could be successful. I probably wouldn't go that far personally unless I was myself hooked but that is quite an interesting idea!

And fortunately these are people I have come across because they wanted to quit. I have been offering kratom to people having withdraws for a while now, but more to just help with the withdraws in times where they don't have what they need, and just kind of hoping they would leave the other stuff behind on their own, even though I know that's not how it works. Then I got the idea of setting up a plan for them and kind of counseling them through it and throwing aya in the mix.
I definitely agree a huge part of it is how much they want to change. Psychedelic experiences can open a door for you but nothing can make you walk through it but your own self. I'm not sure yet how serious they are about changing, but I think it is worth a shot.

Yeah, you gotta be pretty dedicated to go that route. I am not sure that i would like to spend that much time shacked up with a couple of friends for that length of time. Not to mention that opiate addicts can be quite a pain in the butt to be a round.

Further to what Continuum said about psychedelics and painful experiences i have known many opiate addicts who view psychedelics the same way as a vampire views garlic. To me the 2 drugs are polar opposites. One is like being psychologically skinned alive and the other like being wrapped in a warm comfy blanket. There is the risk that your friends will not like being laid bare and end up seeking solace by scurrying back to their blankets and wrapping themselves extra tight.

That JP sears video that was posted has some truth in it. But i think that there are parts of the people that he takes the piss out of in all of us. I think that a lot of comedy works because it makes a joke about a particular type of person and we all laugh, while at the same time thinking "Hmmm, that sounds a little bit like me".

You want to help your mates. That is a noble attribute but be aware that it could lead to abjekt failure or a worse situation. Some of the drop in centre workers that i have met over the years have been heavily jaded due to the revolving door that their clients get stuck in . But, having said that, their efforts are arguably shackled by a state run methadone/subutex program. Psychedelics and addiction is a whole new ballgame and in the right situation i think could be beneficial.

It sound as if you have compassion for for friends who are addicted, OP, unfortunately I don't think you have much empathy. There is nothing that you can do to make your friends do what you want them to do,that is be clean. Unless and until the pain of their addiction becomes greater than the pain the are trying to alleviate, they will only spin their wheels.

In my experience, I learned to tolerate everything up to and including death in order to keep shooting my dope. There was no such thing as a bottom. Sleeping outside in snow didn't do it, not talking to my mother or father for 15 years didn't do it, nearly losing my leg to infection didn't do it. Not until the pain that was a DIRECT consequence of my using became too much for the drugs too overwhelm did I begin to recover.

I'm here to say that the day when heroin stops working all together is a bad one. I'm Grateful as hell tho.

Also, IME, the continual dosing and amounts needed to alleviate dopesickness being so high, they aren't going to be any better off using kratom. If they are interested in replacement therapy, suboxone and methadone on a detox rather than maintenance schedule is a better, more therapeutic proven route.