Serious Coming Off Opioid Maintenance - why it is harder to kick maintenance than heroine

[dopamimetic]

So I have been on morphine maintenance for 18 years or so, mostly on 400mg/d. Previously been on methadone 40-60mg/d. Needless to say, it is hard to quit. I've gone through it multiple times but always failed when the hard physical withdrawal signs set in (diarrhea, feeling sick, etc), or the post-acute mental ones (loneliness, depression, anxiety, restlessness) after day 2 or so.

Now this time I cooked up my morphine pills (due to an unrelated reason- I've explained this in NSPD) to get the pure morphine powder and used it intranasally. Didn't really build down, just took as much as required to not feel withdrawal for maybe 2-3 days, then one night I tripped on DXM and some alcohol, nodding hard and after 18h+ realizing that besides some sweating, there was no fucking morphine withdrawal at all. I am now at day 3 or so, still sweating like a pig but that's all. No post-acute withdrawal (ok, taking some occasional 2-FDCK here and then, but it's no comparison to kicking oral morphine by far)... heavy stuff. It's the peripheral tolerance and/or first pass metabolites keeping you addicted, the health personnel having no fuckin idea and no intranasal morphine being medically available..

So I can only recommend to switch over to H for the last days, apparently.. it can help so much..

 

[Painful One]

Interesting.

Let us know how it goes.
Good Luck! I hope you feel better soon.
Morphine withdrawal is a bitch.

 

[Nunya77]

I went on methadone maintenance treatment in the spring of 2013. This past summer after being on 120mg daily for over 6 yrs I decided I was done. My taper was over in October. Here it is January and I'm just now starting to feel ok. If I would have known this before I think I may have chosen to white knuckle it, kick. with a script of tramadol and just deal with the week of hell. The half life of methadone is much longer than H or other opiates thus the ridiculous withdrawl period. Hope this helps. Best of luck!

 

[VanOccupanther]

Man I’m currently trying to taper off bupe, been on it for three years. It fucking sucks hard! I know they’re doing their best under serious pressure with little resources and I feel bad saying anything negative about them, but I wish my drug service had made it clear just how serious this shit is and how hard it is getting off. It most probably wouldn’t have changed my mind at that point, but really no one even discussed this with me. I was told it’d be a relatively easy taper. It isn’t. I realise it was my responsibility to do some research etc, but I was in a very fucked up state at the time needless to say! Man I’ve done some tapers and I’ve white knuckled it, this is looking like the worst of the lot!

 

[VanOccupanther]

Good luck by the way!

 

[dopamimetic]

Think I am over it, thanks to NMDA antagonists like DXM, Ketamine etc. There wasn't really a withdrawal at all.. it seems like the mental one you can catch with NMDA antags and the physical one by minimizing the amount of opioid that's pheripherally active.