A 1% daily microtaper. A milk tapering disaster. Night terrors that came back. Supplements nobody would let me try. And the online communities that both saved and failed me.
On the 30th of March — just before I drove back home to the Gold Coast from my sister's — I had an appointment with the Acute Care Team at their clinic in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.
The Valley is a grungy, dodgy place at times. Homeless people, drug users, a Chinatown I like but not much else. The reception area was nice but dark and very quiet, and the people sitting inside looked wiped out. This was not a place I ever expected to find myself. I'd never drunk alcohol, never smoked, never touched an illegal drug. And here I was, sitting in what was essentially a substance abuse clinic, because a GP who was falling asleep prescribed me a jar of pills.
I came armed: my own Excel spreadsheet with a taper plan, printed information about the Ashton Manual. I thought I was going to present to a panel. Instead, I sat with a single young doctor — possibly a psychiatry student, she looked early twenties. She said the panel I was supposed to meet had read my file and given her their advice. They never met me.
She gave me a prescription for another 100 x 2mg clonazepam pills and said it should be enough for the taper. It wasn't — not even close. But it was something. And it was one less thing to panic about.
In mid-March I'd joined Beating Benzos (a Facebook group) and Benzo Buddies (an online forum). I was scouring the internet for everything and anything.
Around the 25th of March, I got a taper plan from David Jones at Benzo Buddies. I'd already bought a Gemini 20 jeweller's scale on the 24th and was reading every guide I could find. But David's plan confused me. There was a misunderstanding: he assumed I was taking two 1mg pills when I was actually taking one 2mg pill. He assumed the pill weight changed with the dose — it doesn't in Australia, where 0.5mg and 2mg pills weigh the same. The first plan didn't make sense. The revised one had about eight steps — roughly 10% reductions from the previous dose every 2–4 weeks.
I thought it was really slow. I'd only been on clonazepam for about a month — surely I could go faster. A UK government website even said so explicitly: shorter duration of use means faster tapering is possible.
I didn't want to keep bothering David — he was doing this for free, and I was already writing to him constantly. I'm a programmer with a computer science and mathematics degree. I could figure this out myself. So I built my own Google Sheet: a 1% daily 'hyperbolic' microtaper. Every day, I'd reduce by 1% of my current dose — not the original dose. The right word for it mathematically is exponential decay, not linear. But everyone called it hyperbolic.
I started dry-tapering with the jeweller's scale: calculate the dose, shave the pill, weigh it. But the scale was driving my OCD insane. You'd place the shaved pill on it, and if you left it for ten minutes the reading would drift up by 20mg. Constant tarring, recalibrating. Stressful when you're already anxious about every microgram. Much later found a better scale, cheaper, which is what I now recommend to patients. But in the forums it was always this bloody scale.. so that's what I bought.
I'd seen YouTube videos about milk tapering — dissolving the pill in milk instead of water, because the fat in milk keeps the crushed pill more evenly suspended. Clonazepam isn't really soluble in water; it just sinks to the bottom. With milk, it's more of a suspension (although now I know it's not proven for this drug). So I switched.
The problem: white pill in white milk. I couldn't see what was happening. I'd stir with a teaspoon and draw from roughly the middle with a syringe, but I had no way to verify the concentration was even. For three weeks it worked — or at least I thought it did.
On the 15th of May, I tried the same thing with water just to see what was actually happening. I was horrified. The pill broke into uneven chunks — some tiny, some large. Stirring just pushed the bigger pieces toward the centre, exactly where I'd been drawing. I'd probably been taking more than my calculated dose every time, not less.
I panicked. Decided to go back to milk for the night. I didn't have any prepared, so I put it in the microwave to warm it quickly.
Through April, things were actually going well. I was stabilising on the dose, going to the gym every day for at least an hour, going to the beach. Life was boring and lonely — I was too scared to drive or fly anywhere beyond the Gold Coast/Brisbane corridor — but I was functional. I was doing a free CBT course through Telldoc (short lessons, a therapist chat every week or two, but mostly useless for my situation — they just told me to do breathing exercises).
I was 33% through my taper in five weeks. Fast, but it was working.
Then on the 8th of May, ANZ called me. Again. The same questions I'd already answered multiple times — is the house tenanted, what's the situation, the same forms. It broke me. The stress of the mortgage saga — months of waiting, being called between 3pm and midnight because the whole department is in India, my broker promising to call back and never doing it — finally cracked through whatever stability I'd built.
Over the next few days: chest pressure all the time. A lump in my throat like I was about to cry. Pins and needles. Electricity. And then — the insomnia came back. And two days after that, the night terrors returned.
Once again I woke up not knowing who or where I was. The movies. The hypnic jerks. Everything from before, all over again.
I sent an SOS email to David. He told me to hold the taper. His advice on the wet taper confused me — he was describing a linear microtaper (remove 1mg from 300mg of liquid daily), which contradicted everything in their own hyperbolic tapering guides. Today I understand what he meant. Back then, I didn't.
I thought about updosing — going back to 25% off instead of 33%, to see if it would help. But I'd read in the groups that updosing can backfire badly: sometimes you don't stabilise, and you've just added more drug to a system that's already confused. Most of those warnings were about people doing monthly 10% cuts, not daily microtapers, but I was too scared to risk it. I went back to 32%.
By this point I'd developed a very strict pattern. From about 8pm I'd try to meditate and relax. By 10–11pm I'd attempt to sleep. All day I'd suffer — fatigue, anxiety, electricity, grogginess, boredom. But then, right around sunset, something would shift. For about two hours I'd feel almost normal. Alert. Awake. Like the previous night hadn't happened. Then the window would close and I'd have to try to sleep while suddenly wide awake.
On the 21st of May — the day that was also my mum's birthday — I'd barely slept the night before. I'd tried a body scan meditation that left me feeling like a zombie. My parents came to pick me up for a fancy Persian restaurant I'd always wanted to try for my mum's birthday. My sister was there with my nephews.
I could barely stand straight. The food was amazing but it was hot outside and I spent most of the meal with my face on the table. Afterwards we went to the Spit side of the Broadwater, and I lay on the grass with my hand on my mum's thigh, literally counting the minutes until sunset — because I knew the window was coming and I'd feel human again for two hours.
They dropped me home. An hour later, the window arrived. And I took L-theanine — 300mg — something that had been demonised in the benzo group 'Beating Benzo' by the admin Rosalind Jones as dangerous because it supposedly touches GABA-A receptors - and her own fears from her own sensitivity to some supplements after she CTed herself after 40 years on Benzos.
Within minutes I was normal. Completely normal. I could watch TV. I put on Sweet Tooth — a show I'd been desperate to see but couldn't handle because of the drama and violence. I watched one episode. Started another. Then after two hours, it started wearing off. L-theanine has a short half-life, maybe three hours. By 10pm I was back where I started.
That night the terrors came back in full. Every time I closed my eyes: delusions. One involved my nephew — something about a royal family, England, jewels, me having done something terrible. I knew it wasn't real. I could open my eyes and reality would snap back. But closing them was like plugging into someone else's nightmare.
The next morning I called Julie — the Reiki practitioner my family sees, essentially my sister's therapist. She told me to ground myself: go barefoot on the grass. And she said something I needed to hear: "Guy, you can't do this alone. You need to get to your sister."
I went outside barefoot. Then I stood on my lawn and yelled and cried — my tenants probably heard everything. I called my baby sister and begged her to find agmatine — a supplement I'd seen in a YouTube video by a young guy who seemed to have done his research. It's a metabolite of arginine, mainly used by bodybuilders for better gym performance. I called every health store in Brisbane until we found one in a far-flung suburb that had it in stock. Another thing I was terrified to take because Rosalind had to mention it's 'illegal' in the EU and the UK (in reality, it's just not approved by some random committee because 'there's not enough data').
I packed myself up again and drove to my sister's. When I got there, both sisters and my mum were waiting . My sister managed to find it in some workout supplement shop. I took a small dose of agmatine. It relaxed me — but with that strange spaced-out feeling, like after the acupuncture, where my body felt like it was taking up more space than it should.
I also brought Relora — a supplement that's supposed to reduce cortisol spikes. I'd been scared to try it: the admin of Beating Benzos had specifically warned against it, saying she'd had a horrible setback from it. She'd compiled a "what not to take" list that terrified me. But I was desperate.
That night I took the agmatine, waited an hour, and went to sleep. The movies started when I closed my eyes — oh no. but then I took the Relora. I waited maybe 30-40 minutes, then tried to go back to sleep - and fell asleep! I still woke at 4am. Couldn't get back to sleep. But the terrors didn't come. The delusions didn't come.
I stayed at my sister's for another week. and then got better again.
The benzo community online saved my life. Full stop. Without the forums, the guides, the people who shared their experiences, I would not have known how to taper. My doctors certainly didn't tell me.
But parts of it also harmed me.
The Facebook group Beating Benzos, ran by Rosalind and David Jones, had a culture of fear. Every time I naively asked about a supplement that might help, I'd get shut down. Once she actually cursed at me, deleted her angry comment, and then unfriended me on Facebook. For asking a question.
Her "what not to take" list — which terrified me and probably many many others — contained supplements that her own forum members had reported finding helpful. I went back and found a post from 2016 or 2017 where she'd asked about one of these supplements herself, and multiple people told her it worked for them. She bought it. From the context, it seemed like it worked for her too. Then a year later she put it on the "do not take" list.
The group politics were absurd. Rosalind was a mod in multiple groups. When she blocked me from Beating Benzos, an admin in another group — who was also an admin in a third group that existed specifically because people were against the first group — also blocked me. It was like schoolyard politics, except the schoolyard was full of people in neurological crisis.
I don't hold grudges against individual members who were harmed and trying their best. But admins who censor questions, demonise supplements without evidence, and run their groups like personal fiefdoms? When your members are people in withdrawal who can barely watch a comedy without panicking? That's not peer support. That's a power trip at the expense of the most vulnerable people imaginable. Unfortunately, I later discovered that two other groups - Benzo Warriors and Benzo Recovery & Existance, also had their politics and power fights, but we'll get to that much later, as those were actually very benificial for me until the end of my taper. It's important to use those groups to find other benzo friends, but just remember that the admins are more likely than not people in protracted withdrawal (either from CT - Cold Turkey stop, extra fast taper, rehab, or just very unlucky - it's very rare if you taper slowly and don't get yourself polydrugged) - those are the only people who 'stay' around the groups once they are healed except me and very few others - so they might still be fighting their own demons and not always open for positive dialog.
If you need a 'taper plan' - use my app : www.guythetaperman.com/download-gtt
That will give you a tool to really control your taper without having to resort to asking for the 'free taper plan' from David Jones. I have a whole video about how 'good' those are. And if your case is not straight forward - you need to taper more than one drug, or you feel helpless, confused and need support - please book a time with me. No one can really know what to tell you from a short post you'll put online, and you have no idea who is answering and what do they know. Many of them just repeat in a naive way what people they consider trustworthy told them. My Intake sessions are 2 hours or more of a video call. You get duty of care. You get real help.