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My friend was given fentanyl at a hospital for pain relief after an injury and had completely the opposite reaction. He said it felt so good he would almost certainly have tried to get more if he’d known how. Even now, he said, when something good happens part of him is thinking, ‘Okay, but fentanyl was so much better’.
This was a young, happy man with the world at his feet. The reaction was purely physical. I think @JulianRota is right, there must be an individual difference in response.
From my subjective experience, an individual difference is everything when it comes down to psychoactive substances. People tend to differ much more neurologically then physically, which is unpleasant truth for many. But we cannot see this on the first sight, so this thought rarely comes through our minds. For my part, I get almost no pleasure or kick from drinking alcohol. And I come from heavily-drinking culture, so this is a huge social burden. I have drunk hundreds times and most of the time I get instantly sleepy and then heavily depressed. And I know people who are extremely aggressive and psychotic when drunk, so the response is indeed deeply varied.
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FWIW, I was given IV morphine before surgery for a broken arm as a kid and still remember how amazing it made me feel. They could've marched a firing squad in there with my death warrant and I wouldn't have cared in the slightest.
OTOH, from a very small sample size it appears that I'm allergic to hydrocodone. I got some of those after having wisdom teeth yanked out and they just made me feel sick and unpleasantly intoxicated.
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