A question - if I've been on suboxone for seven months what am I looking at in terms of withdrawal when I jump at 2 mg? Also if I jumped at 12 mg what would I expect?
Jumping at 12mg would be worse than just about any heavy heroin kick, and the acute withdrawals would last about 2 weeks, with days 3-5 being the worst. You would not sleep at all during the first week, won't be able to eat, having horrible diarrhea, be extremely irritable, and have horrible anxiety, night sweats, restless legs, and possible suicidal thoughts / tendencies. When I kicked at that dose it was 2 weeks before I was able to do anything productive, I lost over 20 lbs from not being able to eat a thing, and I lost my mind from not being able to sleep, and that was with a fresh xanax script that I had at my disposal. Things started getting better around the 8 day mark, but it wasn't until around the two week mark that I was really starting to feel better, and the 1 month mark that I was getting more than 5 hours of sleep a night, and could finally start living my life as usual.
At 2mg it would be less intense, but you will still have insomnia for a while, the restless legs, achy body, anxiety, no appetite, diarrhea, and pretty much everything I mentioned before with the 12mg/day kick. But instead of it being that intense for the first two weeks, it would be more like 8-10 days, and not quite as intense but definitely hellish until you start getting some sleep after that first week. That's why it's advised that you taper down to 0.5mg or below before jumping off of it if you've been on it for longer than a month. A slow taper down to a lower dosage will allow for your body to adjust and feel normal with just a very small opioid dosage in it, so going from a low dose to nothing will be a lot easier than a higher dose to nothing. Jumping at 2mg would be like stopping after tapering down to 800mg of codeine a day, but worse since it's in you 24/7 as opposed to a codeine dose that wears off during the day and allows for your system to approach baseline. You also have to consider that this would be what you tapered down to, so all of that other time would be like having doses way higher than 800mg of codeine a day in it.
The reason why the withdrawals from prolonged daily use of suboxone are so bad are because you have had a high dose of a very potent opioid in you 24/7 for 6+ months, so your body had adjusted to operate as 'normal' with that drug in its system, so when you stop it your body gets shocked as it struggles to adjust to operating as 'normal' with zero of that potent opioid in it after being so used to it for all that time. With shorter acting opiates/opioids there are peaks and troughs in the opiate levels in your system, and so it still has a good grasp of how to function properly without the opiates, hence the shorter duration of the withdrawals from shorter acting opiates as your body just needs to adjust to operating without that quick, short spike in opiate levels that it was getting once a day or what have you.
. Does anyone have any questions re: suboxone? I'll help any way I can. Seems dead at mo. Is everyone ok?
