⚠️ Someone who is "snoring" heavily and cannot be woken is not asleep. That is an emergency.
Call 112 now⚠️ Warning still current (Trimbos, April 2026): counterfeit oxycodone containing nitazenes is still circulating.
Read the warning →This is not a story about an addiction. It is a story about a chain: a prescription at discharge, repeat prescriptions for lingering pain, tolerance nobody notices, and then a hospital that stops abruptly. What comes after that is not weakness of character. That is what is left over.
Most information about opioids is about what you should not do. This page is about how it happens, told by someone who lived it.
Not to excuse it. To explain something that looks incomprehensible from the outside: why someone keeps paying a dealer while every signal says it is wrong. If you understand that, you understand why "just stop" is not advice.
A box to take home, with repeat prescriptions attached. Easy to hand over, hard to undo. Nobody says how long you should use it, or when you should stop. That conversation comes later, or not at all.
The pain was real. That is the first thing people do not understand: this does not start with misuse, it starts with a medicine that does what it promises.
And it does more than relieve pain. You get a bit floaty, you feel happier, the stress falls away. At that moment it feels like the perfect solution to everything. An argument at home, stomach ache, chaos in the house, an appointment you dread: there is always the same way out, and it works every time.
That is the dangerous part. Not that it takes away pain, but that it takes away everything at once. A medicine that solves one problem is easy to let go of. One that solves all your problems at once is not.
This is the part I think is most underestimated, including by doctors. And it explains why tapering off is so much harder for some people than for others.
Oxycodone does not only damp pain. It also damps tension, low mood, restlessness and racing thoughts. Someone who only had physical pain loses their pain relief when tapering. Someone who was also struggling with low mood, anxiety, a busy head or sleep problems loses all of it at once.
That is not a matter of less willpower. That is a bigger loss.
Arguments at home, chaos in the house, an appointment I dreaded, a head that would not go quiet. There was always the same way out, and it worked every time. Not a bit: completely.
Every step down brings back not only pain, but also the tension, the low mood and the restlessness underneath it. Often all three at once, and often more intensely than before.
I am convinced that oxycodone hits harder in people who are already mentally struggling. Someone who is depressed, who has ADHD, who carries trauma or is chronically overloaded: for those people the medicine does more than relieve pain. It gives calm where there was none. And that is exactly what you no longer want to be without.
I think part of the explanation for how fast it went with me lies there. Not because my pain was worse than someone else's, but because more was being solved than just pain.
This is a personal observation and not a medical claim. I cannot support it with research and I am not a doctor. But if you recognise it, talk about it. It can change what a tapering plan should look like, and whether treatment for the other side belongs in it.
If you read this and think: that is me, then this is the sentence to take to your GP:
"I think the oxycodone is not only working on my pain. It also takes away tension and low mood. I am afraid that makes tapering harder."
That is not a confession and not an excuse. It is information that determines whether something else is needed alongside a tapering schedule.
Not after months. Within a week of starting, the same amount was already doing less. And you solve that the only way that makes sense at the time: one more pill.
Because two was no longer enough. That is the whole consideration. There is no moment where you think: this is where it starts.
Days, not weeks. One pill before every appointment, for the pain. That sounds reasonable, and at that moment it is.
From two to six in about a week. At this point the day already revolves around timing: when have I had enough, when does the trouble start, how do I get through the night.
From here it is no longer a choice. It is not about getting better, it is about not going into withdrawal.
That is life-threatening. I did not know that, or I did know and it no longer mattered. At that point those two are indistinguishable.
I am prone to addiction. I know that now. With me tolerance set in during the first week, and after that it went fast. For someone else the same trajectory takes months, or does not happen at all.
That is exactly the problem. Nobody told me beforehand that this could happen. I was not asked whether I had struggled with substances before, and there was no agreement about when we would evaluate. If you know you are vulnerable, or you are not sure, that is a conversation that belongs before the first prescription, not after.
That it was for the pain. And that was true, because there was pain. Only the pain I usually had was not the nerve pain it had once been prescribed for, but the shortage of oxycodone itself. I could not make that distinction then. From the inside it feels identical.
That difference has to come from somewhere. And so the second circuit begins, alongside the first.
At weekends to the out-of-hours service, with symptoms that were genuinely there, hoping for a strip or a box. That is not a scheme. I was in pain. Only that pain was by then mostly withdrawal, and I did not understand that clearly enough myself to be able to say it.
What the doctor did not prescribe came from somewhere else. Not out of adventure. Out of arithmetic: so many pills a day were needed and eight were coming in. The difference had to come from somewhere.
A courier who is on his way and "accidentally" brought double, which he cannot take back. The choice: pay more or lose everything. At any other moment in my life I would have seen through that immediately.
But without oxycodone you go literally mad with craving. Your body gives you muscle pain, restlessness, sweating, a sick feeling, and it knows only one solution. In that state you make blind, wrong decisions. Not because you cannot see it. Because at that moment it does not matter what you see.
You take one and nothing happens. The body keeps screaming. So you add a second, and still nothing happens. Then you go into a withdrawal period while believing you took your medication.
That is the most confusing thing there is. You look for another cause: flu, stress, something you ate. The thought that the pills were fake often comes much later. And by then the number is gone.
Oxycodone does not work immediately. There is a delay. With one pill you cannot possibly tell whether it is working or whether something else is going on.
That is exactly why counterfeiting pays so well here. The seller is rarely confronted, because by the time the buyer is certain, there is nobody left to confront.
How that market works →No tapering schedule, no handover, no question about how much I was actually using. The treatment was finished, so the medication was finished.
For someone who at that point moves fridges to get at one pill that has rolled underneath, and who already regularly stands in a car park to top up, that is an impossible instruction.
Not difficult. Impossible. The difference between those two words is exactly where the trap is: care thinks it is closing something off, and in reality closes the only door that was still open.
What happens after that happens out of sight of everyone who ever wrote the prescription.
This is the part that is usually missing from stories like this, and it is the most important part.
Not "you have to stop", but a plan with a timeline. That difference is not cosmetic. It is the difference between an instruction and a treatment.
Small steps. Small enough to sustain, because a step you cannot sustain sets you back further than where you started.
Not pushing on until it goes wrong, but waiting until things were calm before the next reduction. The pace was set by what my body could handle, not by a schedule.
For the final steps, because with a liquid form you can make much smaller doses than with a tablet. That is exactly where tapering goes wrong: the last step from the smallest tablet to nothing is too big.
That belongs here and it may be said. Not through willpower, because I had that in the years before too. Through a plan, and through someone who made that plan and adjusted it.
If a pill fell into the cat litter now and it was my last one, I would fish it out. I once pulled a fridge away from the wall because one had rolled underneath. Under the dust, wipe it off carefully, take it.
That is still true after a successful trajectory. Not because the tapering failed, because it did not. But because the grip of this substance goes further than the use itself. It feels like being possessed.
What did change: there is no pill any more. There is no number any more. There has been a plan and there is someone who knows. That is what tapering gives you. Not that the craving disappears, but that it no longer makes decisions.
There is no moment you can point to where someone made a mistake. The prescription was justified. The repeat prescriptions were understandable. That the hospital stopped at some point was medically defensible. And yet the line runs from a discharge prescription to a car park.
The prescriber assumed the GP would pick it up. The GP assumed the specialist had set it up. Duration of use grows in that gap.
What was on paper was taken as fact. What came on top of that was never discussed, and I did not raise it either.
"It is no longer necessary" is a medical judgement about the medicine. It says nothing about the body that has come to run on it.
Not from the hospital that started it, but from a psychiatrist who stood apart from it. That is luck, not a system.
Because withdrawal is not an inconvenience but a physical emergency: muscle pain, restlessness, sweating, nausea and a craving that drowns out everything. In that state the signals that would normally warn you no longer work. It is not a lack of intelligence. It is a body taking over the decision.
That is the experience described on this page: the medicine damps not only pain but also tension, low mood and restlessness. Someone who was already struggling with that loses more than just pain relief when tapering, and that makes stopping harder. This is a personal observation and not a medical claim, but it is worth discussing with your doctor: it can determine whether treatment for that other side belongs alongside a tapering schedule.
It varies from person to person, but it can be very fast. In the story on this page tolerance set in within a week of starting: from two to three a day, a few days later four, and after about a week six. None of those steps felt like a jump at the time. For someone else the same trajectory takes months or does not happen. Anyone who knows they are vulnerable to substances would do well to discuss that before the first prescription.
From the inside, often nothing. Withdrawal causes real physical symptoms: muscle pain, stomach pain, restlessness, a sick feeling. Someone seeking help for that is rightly seeking help, only the cause has become the treatment itself rather than the original complaint. That distinction is almost impossible to make for the person themselves.
Yes. In this story it worked with a plan of two to three months: a quarter down each time, then stabilising, and at the end a liquid form for very small steps. What made the difference was not willpower but supervision: someone who made the plan and adjusted it.
Zorgfuik collects experiences to show that this is a pattern and not isolated bad luck. And the help page lists who you can call today.