You can get 200ml bottles of codeine linctus which is 15mg/ml of codeine for about £3-4 without prescription. A lot of pharmacies don't stock it though due to addicts but I had a word with my pharmacist and he has no qualms about ordering me a few bottles per month.
Does codeine linctus produce the same effects as codeine in pill form? It seems odd that that's being sold without prescription but pills aren't.
That being said, the only oral pain med that helps me is Oxycodone, and even that isn't very helpful. Dilaudid is best for me, but is only IV.
I had such an awful experience in hospital recently when recovering from surgery; I had oxycodone via IV. I don't recall being in terrible pain when I was on it, and my memory of those days on it are full of blank spaces, though I do remember nurses checking my pain level and my answer being: "there's no pain as long as I don't move," so I must have had some pain despite the oxycodone. But when they took the oxycodone away, the withdrawal was awful. I know I probably would have complained a lot about pain if I'd not had the oxycodone, but I honestly think I would have preferred that pain to the withdrawal. I've had other surgeries with no painkillers in the past (sometimes the surgeon didn't want me having opiates because they slow the bowel down, and he didn't want to risk that after the surgeries).
But the withdrawal from oxycodone was horrendous. I would advise anyone to be extremely wary of taking it over any length of time. I was only on it a few days, and the pain-specialist nurse told me I couldn't have got addicted in so short a time, but I know that I did.
I use codeine every day, and have a physical addiction to that, but if I go without it, the withdrawal is nowhere close to that when I came off oxycodone. For me, the benefits of codeine still outweigh the negatives. But I think people should look at non-addictive painkillers first, be careful even with codeine if you're taking it for more than a day, and use oxycodone only in very extreme circumstances.
