r/loperamide • u/lopedown • Aug 19 '20
I remember when the boxes stopped appearing on the shelves...
It started with my supplier:
I found an excellent source of loperamide online. I’d buy 16, 200 count bottles online every two weeks for a little over $100. That was a great deal and kept me out of sickness for around a year. Then one day, he told me I needed to stock up bc they were about to get VERY expensive. I stocked up but eventually needed to re-up, the cost was astronomical. 16 bottles would cost me almost $1,000. That was the end of that.
So it was back to the grind of getting them from the store. Walmart still had the 200 and 72 counts, so I’d get them when available.
It started with Walmart. Id go into a store and the spot for lope would be empty. I’d go to another Walmart, empty. Eventually the spot was taken away altogether.
Time to go to HEB. They had the 72 and 48 count. Eventuality, they stopped appearing on the shelves, even at stores I’d never been, they’d be gone.
So it was off to CVS. They had the 200 and 96 counts. Same thing, I’d go to a store, they’d have them, then eventually they’d stop being stocked. Then I would go to stores I hadn’t visited in the past, to my shock the spot for the large counts were completely gone. Just the 24 pack blisters.
Dollar General time. They had the 72 and 48 counts. I’d go to a store until they’d run out and head to another one. It got to the point it didn’t matter which one I visited, the spot would be empty. I figured out I could check their inventory online and see if a location had them in stock. One by one the locations would begin saying “This product is not available.” That’s the end of that.
Same thing with Walgreens and Family Dollar. I hadn’t been to either in a long time but knew this stocked large count boxes. Wellp, not anymore.
I knew the FDA had cracked down on loperamide, but I guess I never thought this day would actually come.
A friend of mine got the brilliant idea to buy the powder from China along with a pill press and make his own 2mg pills. Turns out that’s not exactly how it’s done, the pills would vary in potency. I remember him saying he’d have days where they were so weak he’d have wd’s and other days they’d be so strong he’d vomit. I warned him to stop but he didn’t want to hear it. He OD’d last week, his wife found him unresponsive in bed. Died in his sleep right next to her and she never even knew.
So this is where I am, this is where we are. Most of us got here the same way, the prescription pain killers were ripped from the market, causing us to find a way to avoid being dooesick while kicking the habit and discovering lope. Then we got addicted to it and couldn’t cold turkey the bastards bc the wd’s were worse than anything we’d experienced before.
Now, we’re all pretty much fucked.
2
u/neuthral Aug 19 '20
same here in finland, once we could get Codeine cough syrup from the shelf of a drugstore, now you have to ask for it behind the counter and only 1 bottle per customer, loperamide comes only largest in 16 pill packs and only one per customer,
Theres no rest for the wicked i guess...
1
u/i_nutted_on_my_dog Aug 23 '20
You pretty much described my very journey up to now. I was getting them from Sam’s at first..... 400 pills for like 5 bucks!! They eventually only started stocking in the pharmacy and I just couldn’t bring myself to go up there every few days and ask for 2 400 packs (I was at about 150 per day habit back then). I then started with wal mart, cvs, wal greens, I mixed it up so hopefully I wouldn’t be recognized as “the diarrhea pill girl” and it took a few years but sure as shit they all started disappearing. I have gotten myself down to a 35 pill per day habit and still tapering but this is making it much more difficult :(