Fortwin tablets (scanned) containing 25 mg pentazocine HCl each.
Guest writer veritas [sixthseal.com] reporting for duty. I’m back as promised. 🙂
These are Fortwin tablets, made by Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals in India.
Unlike most pentazocine tablet formulations, Fortwin tablets do not
have Naloxone (an opiate antagonist, basically nullifies the “good”
effects of opiates). Technically, this makes it more euphoric and also
makes the tablets injectable. Fortwin tabs is the only formulation that
contains the lactate injectable form of pentazocine and is much sought after.
The Malaysian list of approved pharmaceuticals does not include pentazocine
only tablets (it only has pentazocine for injections in vials) so I was puzzled at
how my pharmacist managed to get a hold of these.
Anyway, he told me that these were supposed to be cleared out ages
ago, but the expiry date was still valid (expires next year) and he
only had 8 tablets of 25 mg pentazocine hydrocloride each, so he just
left it in the stock room. These are from India, the tablets have
“FORTWIN” imprinted on the front and “RANBAXY” on the back. There is a
single score running down the back of the tablets and they appear to be
off-white, with blue specks.
Well, since he only has 8 of them left, he sold it to me for RM 0.80
each, instead of the list price of RM 1.50. I just happened to stumble
across these while looking around my friend’s stock room for
recreational offerings from The Wonderful World of Pharmaceuticals.
I’ve heard of pentazocine before as one of the lesser known opiate
agonists (or opioids to be more accurate) and I’ve read of DXM type
disassociative effects dominating the opiate type effects at higher
doses. An aside for new readers, I have a friend who owns a pharmacy,
so I do not need prescriptions for prescription drugs.
Fortwin by Ranbaxy tablets photo.
Anyway, since the 8 tablets total only 200 mg, I could not
experiement with the 300 mg and 400 mg doses quoted as necessary for
producing DXM type reactions, so my experience was with pentazocine as
an opiate agonist. I took 200 mg on an empty stomach and potentiated it
(as I assumed all opiates can be potentiated) with benzodiazepines – 3
mg alprazolam and 20 mg diazepam. I am sufficiently experienced with
benzodiazepines (very sadly so) so I could differentiate the effects. I
wrote this:
it’s like codeine but qualitatively “dreamier”, more “smacky”,
and stronger than an equal dose, i’ll say comparable to 350 – 400 mg
codeine.
stuck to bed
late histamine release – 3 h?
“heavy” feeling more than codeine
it makes a buzzing sound when on and no buzzing sound when off
Well, many hours later (after the opiate effects were tapering off)
I found it very hard to go to sleep. I took some more benzos (50 mg
diazepam) but sleep was unattainable even after 3 hours. I had rather
strange “thought loops” and very minor “flanging” as I lay there with
my eyes closed…almost like a 3rd plateau DXM trip, although obviously
with much, much less intensity. Whether this is possible with just 200
mg of pentazocine or not is questionable, and I could not obtain any
more pentazocine only (without naloxone) tablets to repeat the
experiement, so take the DXM part as just an aside.
Anyway, I did not know the exact time I fell asleep, but it was
about T+ 10 or more. Oh, and by the way, I’m benzodiazepine tolerant so
the diazepam wouldn’t have helped much. Well, Fortwin (pentazocine
hydrocloride) tablets seems to be a fun compound – I mean the Ranbaxy
manufactured ones without any nasty opiate antagonists. It’s a little
different from codeine and dihydrocodeine, pentazocine has its own
strange character, but it’s not comparable with the higher end opiates
like oxycodone or heroin if you’re wondering.
I do not know the LD50 values for pentazocine, but 200 mg (verified)
doses does not kill if that helps. 😉 It’s funny, this pentazocine –
it’s classified as a benzomorphan (what an interesting name) or
benzazocine. The US formulation of Talwin contains naloxone if I’m not
mistaken, but if you find this Ranbaxy Fortwin tablets, give them a
test drive*, it’s certainly something different and interesting. 🙂 I
would love to hear if anyone has experience with 300-400 mg doses and
noticed effects consistant with dextromethorphan.
*This only applies to existing recreational drug users who are
willing to experiment. sixthseal.com does not promote drug use –
illicit or otherwise and does not condone such activities to people who
are not already aquainted with or part of the diverted pharmaceuticals
or illicit substance use scene.
