Ok, so I have a question, and I cant seem to find it when i UTFSE. see, I have been maintaining on subs, but trying to quit, (and i could, if I can get a steady supply of subs to maintain on) but I've been addicted for 6 years, tried to quit for 5, and have already gotten VERY VERY close to death with an OD. so I'm pretty much ready to just replace it for now in order to get my life back on track. My question is, How low would one's dose of bupe have to be in order to have virtually no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever? I'm a pussy, and I can justify it medically, but frankly, I don't feel the need to.
Ok so suboxone is purely for addiction so its like almost 99.9% unlikely you're getting subs for pain relief. No doctor in their right mind would prescribe subs to someone for any other purpose. In my state NSW Health would fuck your shit up good. Hell a single complaint got my prescriber fucked up, under supervision and in big trouble. And all he did was give slightly (and i mean very slightly) a patient extra takeways.
Anyway about your problem. Suboxone is 4 X as powerful as morphine. So for example 0.4mg of bupe = 20 mg of morphine.
So imagine a shot of heroin that gets you fucked up (about 20-30mg - probably a point in street terms). Well times that by 4 and thats a single dose of bupe. The shit is strong and it lasts for 3 day. I remember before i got into smack full time, taking about 0.2mg of subutex. I was fucked to the high heavens for literally 2 days. The third day i was still pretty high but able to stop vomiting.
So back to the problem. I imagine you've gotten yourself down to 2mg several times and decided to jump/cold turkey from that point. Well that's still like 8-10 times the equivalent dose of morphine. Imagine having 8-10 shots a day of heroin/morphine and trying to go cold turkey on that. It is fucked up (incidentally this is what I did awhile ago. I jumped from a stupidly high dose of heroin onto suboxone. Worse cut over ever. i mean if you took all my nightmares, and the worst things that have ever happened and bottled them up and forced me to drink it, i would still rather that then the 15 never ending hours of cut over hell.
So what you need to do is learn how to cut up your 2mg strips so you taper down even further.
There is a small problem with this. There is no guarrentee that the strips have a even coating. See Reckitt Benckiser were goddamn fucking assholes when they developed subutex, and later suboxone, and then suboxone films. See when they were losing their ten year exclusivity period with subutex/suboxone tablets, they came out with bullshit research that supposedly children (won't someone think of the children) were dying from eating their parents subutex/subuxone tablets. So in response to this made up problem they created the suboxone strips. They aren't allowed to renew the patent on buprenorphine but what they were able to do is get an exclusive never expiring patent on the strip technology itself. Its medical DRM.
So with the pretend problem in hand their account managers marketed heavily to the public and private addiction clinics/centres/hospitals that people were abusing subutex/suboxone tablets. They were shooting them up etc. Of course there was the threat of cheap generics but despite knowing from day one that people were shooting up their subutex tablets, they all of a sudden made it a big deal.
Now i don't know if you realise but the vast majority of medical professionals fucking hate addicts. Their disdain knows no bounds. They abhor us. Pity and for the most part loath us. Especially male addicts. The idea that we could be getting high is such an abomination to everything they hold dear (even though they're hypocrites to the tenth degree) that when Reckitt offered them a supposedly abuse resistant drug they jumped on like a $2 dollar hooker. Despite the fact that strips can be shot up, despite the fact that if you wanted to you can get high from bupe. We all know it. There are ways to potentiate it. Hell just cut back for a while and take a big dose. That's what I end up doing when I have extreme pain. Its not like I can go out and pop some panadeine forte.
So Reckitt basically made a drug delivered on a "technology" that stops at 2mg. There are no protocols, no trials no clinical process to actually taper down from 2mg. The formal line is that the patient simply continue their script, taking the 2mg over a greater period of time. i.e. 2mg every second day and so on.
But that's just silly. So go to this
website, there is a
calculator, a very detailed description on how to cut up your 2mg strips and alllllloottta help on creating a taper plan.
Also there is a lot of help on how to induct. In the event you end up using and need to go back onto your suboxone. Good luclk
I can't think of anything worse than cold turkeying clonazepam in jail. After three years on that one you'd want to go as steady as you are able with the taper. Do your best to be as consistent as possible with what you have. Slow and steady wins the benzo taper race. All the best with it, neozanoro.
oh man....i'm getting cold sweats.
But Neozanoro. You really don't want to have any habit if/when you end up in prison. Not because its awful withdrawing in a cell. No that's not the problem at all. In fact you probably won't withdraw. Why because there are more drugs inside prison then there are outside. Literally if you give away you're addicted to benzo you'll be setup with a line of credit. These people will ensure that you literally hooked and you and your family will be on the line for any debt you rack up.
And prison drug prices are like 3-4X what they are outside, at least.
I'm not suggesting you change your taper plan. Firstly you should find a doctor. Admit/come clean. Get a proper taper plan. Secondly stay busy. The worst thing i've found with my tapering is when I'm not working/doing something.
Almost straight away my mind starts to wander, i get a few cold sweats, anxiety comes a knocking (which is strange because you'd think that fuck would be too anxious to knock on a door) and I instantly start thinking about cheating on the plan.
But like Halif said, slow and steady wins the race with benzo's You know how people like to cock size when it comes to drugs. "oh man i took like 8 tabs of acid" or "yeah last night I got fucked up on a gram of ice"....whatever right. Even with tappering we boast. Hell i was going to shit on about going from 40mg to 6mg a day in like 30 days. But you know what. The hardest thing, that would actually be boastful, is being able to say that you stuck to your taper plan and didn't waive/break.
But yeah. find some help, get some help. Not because you need it this second. But maybe when things get harder, and close to the date of impeding doom that things might even worse then.
