Help with measurements

I am using a 10 ml syringe to take my dose of 0.30 mg by attenuated tablet of 0.25 mg and 0.5ml of liquid.

But further decrease want me the liquid measurements to be 0.47ml. I am not able to get any 1ml or 2ml syringe, it all comes with needle so cannot suck the benzo particles.

What shall I do now?

How do you get 0.3mg from a 0.25mg tablet? Could you clarify your method and the measurements involved?

The simple answer would be to use more liquid to create a larger dilution so that your 10ml syringe will be of sufficient accuracy to take your desired reductions. Roughly 5-10x the "liquid" might get you there.

What are the measurements on the 10ml syringe you have? If there is 1 line between each 1ml marking then it measures by the 0.5ml; if there are 4 lines between each 1ml then it measures by the 0.2ml.

We can work this out. Just let us know some more details about your situation. 

How do you get 0.3mg from a 0.25mg tablet? Could you clarify your method and the measurements involved?

 

The simple answer would be to use more liquid to create a larger dilution so that your 10ml syringe will be of sufficient accuracy to take your desired reductions. Roughly 5-10x the "liquid" might get you there.

 

What are the measurements on the 10ml syringe you have? If there is 1 line between each 1ml marking then it measures by the 0.5ml; if there are 4 lines between each 1ml then it measures by the 0.2ml.

 

We can work this out. Just let us know some more details about your situation. 

Bro, I'm using a tablet of 0.25 mg plus a 0.05 mg of liquid.

I have made the liquid by mixing 2 ml alcohol and 8 ml water for 1 mg of ETIZOLAM.

How do I make the dilute liquid?

In my 10ml syringe I'm having marks like 0.1, 0.2 etc

Bro, I'm using a tablet of 0.25 mg plus a 0.05 mg of liquid.

I have made the liquid by mixing 2 ml alcohol and 8 ml water for 1 mg of ETIZOLAM.

How do I make the dilute liquid?

In my 10ml syringe I'm having marks like 0.1, 0.2 etc

Hi ScaredCat,

Thanks for clarifying this for me.

I hear that you're doing a liquid/tablet hybrid, and I understand your liquid is a water-suspension with a portion of ethanol (maybe 10% ethanol if you're using 80 proof i.e. 40% ethanol vodka or similar). I was not able to find any ethanol solubility information for etizolam, so I don't think there's any known benefit in using a specific ratio of ethanol in your mixture. You can do an alcohol-soak stage for wetting the tablets and this might help in some nebulous way, but without some relative data about ethanol-to-water solubility rates I'm not at all confident that any significant dissolution is happening at 10% ethanol.

My point is that I think you're working with a water-suspension of deconstructed tablets, and as such two major factors are what I'd consider when working with this approach: particle size and volume of liquid, both of which can improve the characteristics of a suspension. We could go into ways to improve the viscosity and thus the suspending properties of water itself, but it gets complicated so let's just stick with plain water for now.

If you have the resources, I suggest using a mortar and pestle to finely wet grind your 1mg of etizolam in a little water before pouring this into your primary measuring vessel and then rinsing the mortar and pestle with more water again into the vessel to get all the medicine and excipients out of the mortar and into the final liquid.

Then I suggest diluting this liquid to a volume of 100ml. This produces a 0.01mg/ml suspension. A greater volume of liquid has a number of benefits including a longer suspension time, smaller measuring errors, and more reduction intervals.

With a 0.01mg/ml suspension, I suggest following all the basic suspension guidelines such as stirring or shaking vigorously immediately before dosing, and quickly withdrawing the dose from near the middle of the volume of liquid. With this dilution your dose of 0.3mg will be 0.25mg of tablets and 5ml of liquid. You can reduce by whatever intervals your syringe(s) can reliably measure; if your 10ml syringe has accuracy to the 0.1ml, these are intervals of 0.001mg with this suggested liquid dilution.

I suggest when you resume tapering to considering trialing 0.001mg reductions every day if possible, holding when necessary to recover functionality. I've found that smaller more frequent reductions can significantly reduce WD symptom severity. That being said, I've also found it's important to pay close attention as symptom severity can rise slowly and be more difficult to notice this way. Overall, I prefer daily reduction schedules for greater consistency of symptom severity and lower intensity, and I would recommend this approach especially for etizolam due to it's short half-life.

I've laid out a suggested approach to your water-suspension with options to improve the stability of your suspension, and to get your liquid to a dilution that you can take 0.001mg reductions using your 10ml syringe with 0.1ml gradations.

Does this make sense to you? Any questions or concerns?

I hope this helps. 

Bro, I'm using a tablet of 0.25 mg plus a 0.05 mg of liquid.

I have made the liquid by mixing 2 ml alcohol and 8 ml water for 1 mg of ETIZOLAM.

How do I make the dilute liquid?

In my 10ml syringe I'm having marks like 0.1, 0.2 etc

 

Hi ScaredCat,

Thanks for clarifying this for me.

 

I hear that you're doing a liquid/tablet hybrid, and I understand your liquid is a water-suspension with a portion of ethanol (maybe 10% ethanol if you're using 80 proof i.e. 40% ethanol vodka or similar). I was not able to find any ethanol solubility information for etizolam, so I don't think there's any known benefit in using a specific ratio of ethanol in your mixture. You can do an alcohol-soak stage for wetting the tablets and this might help in some nebulous way, but without some relative data about ethanol-to-water solubility rates I'm not at all confident that any significant dissolution is happening at 10% ethanol.

 

My point is that I think you're working with a water-suspension of deconstructed tablets, and as such two major factors are what I'd consider when working with this approach: particle size and volume of liquid, both of which can improve the characteristics of a suspension. We could go into ways to improve the viscosity and thus the suspending properties of water itself, but it gets complicated so let's just stick with plain water for now.

 

If you have the resources, I suggest using a mortar and pestle to finely wet grind your 1mg of etizolam in a little water before pouring this into your primary measuring vessel and then rinsing the mortar and pestle with more water again into the vessel to get all the medicine and excipients out of the mortar and into the final liquid.

 

Then I suggest diluting this liquid to a volume of 100ml. This produces a 0.01mg/ml suspension. A greater volume of liquid has a number of benefits including a longer suspension time, smaller measuring errors, and more reduction intervals.

 

With a 0.01mg/ml suspension, I suggest following all the basic suspension guidelines such as stirring or shaking vigorously immediately before dosing, and quickly withdrawing the dose from near the middle of the volume of liquid. With this dilution your dose of 0.3mg will be 0.25mg of tablets and 5ml of liquid. You can reduce by whatever intervals your syringe(s) can reliably measure; if your 10ml syringe has accuracy to the 0.1ml, these are intervals of 0.001mg with this suggested liquid dilution.

 

I suggest when you resume tapering to considering trialing 0.001mg reductions every day if possible, holding when necessary to recover functionality. I've found that smaller more frequent reductions can significantly reduce WD symptom severity. That being said, I've also found it's important to pay close attention as symptom severity can rise slowly and be more difficult to notice this way. Overall, I prefer daily reduction schedules for greater consistency of symptom severity and lower intensity, and I would recommend this approach especially for etizolam due to it's short half-life.

 

I've laid out a suggested approach to your water-suspension with options to improve the stability of your suspension, and to get your liquid to a dilution that you can take 0.001mg reductions using your 10ml syringe with 0.1ml gradations.

 

Does this make sense to you? Any questions or concerns?

I hope this helps. 

I understood your explanation very clearly.

Yes a doubt - Is there a shelf life for the dilution? How often should I prepare the dilution?

It brings me back to life when someone is there to help me, I just did a mistake with another drug reducing in between so still waiting to get stability, seems like a far cry..

Is there a shelf life for the dilution? How often should I prepare the dilution?

 

It brings me back to life when someone is there to help me, I just did a mistake with another drug reducing in between so still waiting to get stability, seems like a far cry..

If you're referring to your recent reduction of propranolol, I think I posted on your Withdrawal Support thread regarding this. Stability can take a little while and one thing that could help is having a more reliable method to dose your benzo; I think your 0.1mg/ml liquid from etizolam tablets is a bit risky. I believe making such a small amount of liquid can lead to large measuring errors, transfer loss, and other problems.

There is a shelf-life to everything. If you use distilled water or another very clean water source, and you keep the current batch of suspension in the fridge between doses, I think it would last many days, possibly weeks. But to err on the side of caution I suggest considering 5-7 days as a maximum storage time. I don't have any data or experience regarding the stability of the etizolam under these conditions so I think it's better to make smaller batches more often than risk the variable of your liquid losing its potency.

I realize now that 100ml of liquid will last you 20 days at present with your liquid/tablet hybrid. Going that long with a single batch of water suspended tablets seems risky to me.

What is the potency in milligrams of your tablets?

And to what degree can you accurately divide them (1/2s, 1/4s)?

And just out of curiosity, how often do you dose in the day?

I think we can come up with a good batch size for you. 

Is there a shelf life for the dilution? How often should I prepare the dilution?

 

It brings me back to life when someone is there to help me, I just did a mistake with another drug reducing in between so still waiting to get stability, seems like a far cry..

 

If you're referring to your recent reduction of propranolol, I think I posted on your Withdrawal Support thread regarding this. Stability can take a little while and one thing that could help is having a more reliable method to dose your benzo; I think your 0.1mg/ml liquid from etizolam tablets is a bit risky. I believe making such a small amount of liquid can lead to large measuring errors, transfer loss, and other problems.

 

There is a shelf-life to everything. If you use distilled water or another very clean water source, and you keep the current batch of suspension in the fridge between doses, I think it would last many days, possibly weeks. But to err on the side of caution I suggest considering 5-7 days as a maximum storage time. I don't have any data or experience regarding the stability of the etizolam under these conditions so I think it's better to make smaller batches more often than risk the variable of your liquid losing its potency.

 

I realize now that 100ml of liquid will last you 20 days at present with your liquid/tablet hybrid. Going that long with a single batch of water suspended tablets seems risky to me.

 

What is the potency in milligrams of your tablets?

And to what degree can you accurately divide them (1/2s, 1/4s)?

And just out of curiosity, how often do you dose in the day?

 

I think we can come up with a good batch size for you. 

My tablet size is 0.25 mg. That's the lowest form of tablet for ETIZOLAM available or manufactured. I'm using a very costly professional pill cutter, but what I have seen is even with it I'm not able to cut the tablet accurately in half - may be due to it's small size.

I dose once a day in the morning after breakfast.

I think whenever I go below the 0.25 mg mark, I may have to go fully liquid.

Thanks immensely for taking time and saving lives!!

My tablet size is 0.25 mg. That's the lowest form of tablet for ETIZOLAM available or manufactured. I'm using a very costly professional pill cutter, but what I have seen is even with it I'm not able to cut the tablet accurately in half - may be due to it's small size.

I dose once a day in the morning after breakfast.

 

I think whenever I go below the 0.25 mg mark, I may have to go fully liquid.

 

Thanks immensely for taking time and saving lives!!

I'm happy to help you ScaredCat. Thank you for this additional information about your tablets.

I'm relieved to find out that you don't have 1mg tablets, but I understand that the 0.25mg are not reliably splitting with your tool and method. I know you're in India, but this is the tablet splitter that I use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MH6XTL7

And this is how I use it:

Irregardless, I can help you design a water-suspension batch size from 0.25mg whole tablets. Because you're currently taking 0.3mg/day by way of 0.25mg as a tablet and 0.05mg from liquid, I suggest considering the following:

I would take one 0.25mg tablet, crush it to fine wet paste if possible (as described previously to minimize surface transfer loss), and dilute it to a final volume of 50ml (resulting in 0.005mg/ml). This will create a ~5 day supply at 10ml/day consumption of liquid, and this volume of liquid will last longer and longer as you taper the daily 10ml of liquid down to zero over time.

When you resume tapering, I suggest considering reducing this 10ml of 0.005mg/ml liquid by 0.2mL/day, going from 10ml -> 9.8ml -> 9.6ml etc. which combined with a 0.25mg tablet is 0.3mg/day -> 0.299mg -> 0.298 etc. i.e. 0.001mg daily reductions. This liquid would take around 50 days to eliminate, depending on how your body responds to this daily reduction quantity. I suggest being patient with this approach and prioritizing steady reductions over reduction speed, as I know you've been consistently destabilized by overly rapidly reductions in the past. I think it's a good idea to hold on days when you notice your functionality is impaired, and only resume daily cutting once you've stabilized again.

Once you have eliminated the liquid portion of your daily dose then I agree with your idea to switch entirely to liquid for doses of 0.25mg/day and below. A different batch size and dilution may be necessary at this point, as well as possibly a smaller daily reduction quantity. We can help you figure out something that will work at that time.

For now, if it appeals to you, I suggest holding until you're stable while dosing steadily with a 0.005mg/ml water suspension made as described above so that you can practice and improve your liquid making and measuring procedures before beginning to taper with this new liquid. If you cannot stabilize while dosing consistently with a water suspension, it may be necessary to consider a more reliable tapering method. For now though, I think it's worth a try.

Let us know if you have questions/concerns, or other ideas about how you'd like to taper. 

My tablet size is 0.25 mg. That's the lowest form of tablet for ETIZOLAM available or manufactured. I'm using a very costly professional pill cutter, but what I have seen is even with it I'm not able to cut the tablet accurately in half - may be due to it's small size.

I dose once a day in the morning after breakfast.

 

I think whenever I go below the 0.25 mg mark, I may have to go fully liquid.

 

Thanks immensely for taking time and saving lives!!

 

I'm happy to help you ScaredCat. Thank you for this additional information about your tablets.

 

I'm relieved to find out that you don't have 1mg tablets, but I understand that the 0.25mg are not reliably splitting with your tool and method. I know you're in India, but this is the tablet splitter that I use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MH6XTL7

 

And this is how I use it:

 

Irregardless, I can help you design a water-suspension batch size from 0.25mg whole tablets. Because you're currently taking 0.3mg/day by way of 0.25mg as a tablet and 0.05mg from liquid, I suggest considering the following:

 

I would take one 0.25mg tablet, crush it to fine wet paste if possible (as described previously to minimize surface transfer loss), and dilute it to a final volume of 50ml (resulting in 0.005mg/ml). This will create a ~5 day supply at 10ml/day consumption of liquid, and this volume of liquid will last longer and longer as you taper the daily 10ml of liquid down to zero over time.

 

When you resume tapering, I suggest considering reducing this 10ml of 0.005mg/ml liquid by 0.2mL/day, going from 10ml -> 9.8ml -> 9.6ml etc. which combined with a 0.25mg tablet is 0.3mg/day -> 0.299mg -> 0.298 etc. i.e. 0.001mg daily reductions. This liquid would take around 50 days to eliminate, depending on how your body responds to this daily reduction quantity. I suggest being patient with this approach and prioritizing steady reductions over reduction speed, as I know you've been consistently destabilized by overly rapidly reductions in the past. I think it's a good idea to hold on days when you notice your functionality is impaired, and only resume daily cutting once you've stabilized again.

 

Once you have eliminated the liquid portion of your daily dose then I agree with your idea to switch entirely to liquid for doses of 0.25mg/day and below. A different batch size and dilution may be necessary at this point, as well as possibly a smaller daily reduction quantity. We can help you figure out something that will work at that time.

 

For now, if it appeals to you, I suggest holding until you're stable while dosing steadily with a 0.005mg/ml water suspension made as described above so that you can practice and improve your liquid making and measuring procedures before beginning to taper with this new liquid. If you cannot stabilize while dosing consistently with a water suspension, it may be necessary to consider a more reliable tapering method. For now though, I think it's worth a try.

 

Let us know if you have questions/concerns, or other ideas about how you'd like to taper. 

Can I ask for a help? If you can experiment cutting a small pill and see if it's accurate? If yes it would be helpful for me as I'm willing to buy the one you having.

Can I ask for a help? If you can experiment cutting a small pill and see if it's accurate? If yes it would be helpful for me as I'm willing to buy the one you having.

I'm sorry, I don't have any etizolam pills to experiment on. I only have generic 0.5mg clonazepam tablets; the same pills shown in the video. They measure 8mm in diameter, just under 3mm thick, and are scored in the middle.

I went through four different razor-blade type pill cutters trying to split my current tablets and the results were always very uneven and crumbled divisions; truly horrendous results. The aluminum pill splitter (when the pills are stood on-end) makes nearly perfect halves and quarters for me if done carefully.

I hope this helps!