Heroin after 1 year of Suboxone - PLEASE HELP

Hello all,

I have been on 16mg of suboxone for a year now, after a lengthy heroin habit. My wife (who I have been unable to see for several months) returns tomorrow, and is staying til sunday night. 3 Days ago, I cut my dose down to 12mg, 2 days ago to 8, and 8 yesterday. Today I've taken no suboxone. In the past year, while on suboxone, I've never relapsed, so I don't know how to handle this. Everyday when I wakeup, I NEED to take suboxone, otherwise I go into withdrawal. Today, I did not take any suboxone, instead I snorted a bag of philly's finest. It did not make me feel good at all, just took away the withdrawal. I am wondering if tomorrow, when my wife returns, I will be able to have fun with her doing dope, or if I will just be avoiding withdrawal? Its been a year since Ive done dope, and would really like to celebrate it, and her return, with my wife, but I'm not sure I'll be able to feel it. Again, I took my last dose (4mg) of suboxone yesterday at 5pm, she comes tomorrow at 5pm, so about 48hrs after my last dose. Like I said, I've never relapsed in the year I've done suboxone, so I have no idea how long I need to wait. I hear 72 hours which scares me. Please hlep.

Thank You.

I'm going to move this to OD as they have a lot more experience with Suboxone than we do here..

From what I have read it certainly can take up to 72 hours, yes.. what worries me most though is you've not relapsed in a year yet you are going to now. Is it really worth risking slipping back into addiction, when you've been doing so well keeping clean and on the Suboxone?

BDD > OD

I will not relapse. I've seen the horrors of heroin addiction, which is why I have been fine the year I've been on suboxone. I just want to enjoy it for a day or two with my love. Thank you for move.

Ive gone back and forth from heroin to subutex/suboxone for years now and i can tell that just me personally when i start doing the heroin I don't start taking bupe again until i have to. Because when I'm on heroin bupe just seems really lame and boring and a last resort thing. This is how it works for me it takes a few days to start feeling the heroin so my excuse to use is always "damn I don't feel it like I should today, I'll just do it one more time tomorrow so I can feel it good then ill start taking sub again." That goes on for a few days until I'm feeling it good then my excuse turns into "I can definitely afford to get high some more and I'm not really getting sick enough to take my sub so I'll just do it again today and start taking it tomorrow." Then about a month down the road after I've blown through a few grand and I cant even afford to do anymore I'll start taking the sub again.

Just consider all that, and I know your prob not like me and you know your not gonna get back into it like I did but just remember how uncontrollable it was for you before. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result. But the way I look at it is insanity is doing the same thing over again and knowing what the result will be! Thats insane there.

But back to your question of when you will feel the dope. Since you have been on sub so long it will prob be a good 4-5 days at least before you actually feel it 100%. Whenever you take sub for an extended period of time its a gradual process being able to feel dope again. If you felt nothing today but relief from withdraw that means you MIGHT feel a little rush tomorow and MAYBE catch a little nod at best. But you will pretty much be throwing your money away the first few days coming off the sub.

I have been on buprenorphine for 4 years and stopped taking it for 5 days and I still wasn't able to feel anything at all from a 1200mcg fentanyl lozenge. The reason being tolerance more likely than the blockade effect, but I have my doubts. I hate Suboxone so bad...

One of the weird things is that when I wakeup in the morning, even though I took 8 - 16mg the day before, I am in withdrawal. If suboxone has such a long half-life, why am I in withdrawal when I wakeup? Is it just the blocking effect that lasts so long?

Well when I was on the tabs and strips (the butrans patches are so much better but dose is a lot lower) I would feel WD from it by the end of the day, so to avoid WD I'd take it twice daily. The long half-life (36 hours?) made no difference in stopping WD's only 10 hours after dose...Butrans delivers a constant dose so no WD symptoms until the patch ran out.

MystiKasT said:

One of the weird things is that when I wakeup in the morning, even though I took 8 - 16mg the day before, I am in withdrawal. If suboxone has such a long half-life, why am I in withdrawal when I wakeup? Is it just the blocking effect that lasts so long?

Click to expand...

This is EXACTLY how i feel every morning whether I take 2 subs or even 4 the day before

Its because you cut your dose down. You prob weren't in that bad of a withdrawal when you woke up. You prob just felt like you needed to dose. I know that feeling whenever I went to prison i was on 24 mg on subutex a day. The first day without it i felt like i was withdrawing but i really found out what withdrawing from bupe is like on the 3rd day. It was sooo much worse. The first couple days seemed like a beautiful piece of pie compared to that day. Also if you take a whole lot of bupe like more than 24 mg a day ive read that it can actually be counterproductive and it will still block opiates but you will have mild withdraw symptoms while on it. Thats why they say less is more with bupe. I honestly dont see any reason for someone to be on more than 8mg a day unless you are just coming off opiates. Dont get me wrong i want the extra pills but i wont ever take more than that nowadays its pointless.

The blocking effect lasts for a good while if you have been dosing for months or years. If you have only been taking it once or for a few days then you can def feel dope a good bit 24 hours later and def within 48.

Here's a tip for optimal Suboxone (sublingual) absorption: put under tongue about an hour before you wake up, going back to sleep to let it dissolve...this way you are not producing much saliva at all and it dissolves a lot more slowly and thoroughly...when I would do this (back when I was on sublingual dosing) I would get a stimulating bupe high that would last for hours and prevent WD for a day and a half. This is the best tip I have for taking Suboxone.

bump for help please

Eight mg is way to high of a dose to try and sniff a bag of dope on and get high. When I was on a dose like that I had to shoot three to four bags to feel anything. Not worth wasting the money till your under four mg

during my dope addiction, if i couldn't score before i'd goto work, i would take 2 mgs of suboxone/tex in the morning (around 8-9 am) and then by lunch time i'd usually be able to come up with money to go cop around 3 pm and do my dope at around 4 pm, and surprisingly if i had only used the sub THAT day, then followed by the dope x ammount of hours later, i actually noticed a potenation in the dope instead of the usual blocking effects of the subs, though i believe if you were to dose over 2 mgs you would run more into the blocking effect instead of the almost seemingly potenation
this is a tried and true method for me as i had done it a few times a week for about ~10 months at work if i couldn't score before work and i always seemed to actually get a boost in the high off the dope, reguardless if you want to believe me or not..

anyone else ever do anything similar and get results comparable to mine?

I was on the same exact amount for nearly the exact same amount of time. At 16mg, I was not about to feel heroin unless I waited 5+ days, and the whole 5 days I would be kicking the bupe just to get high a few times then go back on the bupe and the cycle would start again. At 8mg+ for mantinence lengths of time has an incredibly long blocking effect. I wasted alot of money on smack just trying to get high. I remember this one night, I bought 3 gs after 72 hrs off the bupe and every shot I did didnt do shit....if anything I got a mini rush about 1/10 the strength of a regular rush and kept redosing just chasing that rush that never came.

Also I should mention....you say you feel sick the very next day if you dont take your bupe, it generally took me 2 days to feel the sickness, and that was just the beginning, it really took 3-4 days for me to realize the first couple days were a peice of cake, and then 7 days of liiiiiiiiiingering w/d that never seemed to end. Generally a 10-14 days kick to kinda feel normal again. Not as strong a withdrawal as say heroin/morphine/oxy but longer lasting which drives you crazy. I'd take 3-4 days of heroin withdrawal any day over coming off 16mg of bupe for any extended period of time.

This was all 2 years ago, I'm off bupe now and still abuse opiates. I live in constant fear of never being able to fully get off opiates.

PS: I don't pay my taxes.

Does anyone know what the cut-ff dose of buprenorphine is for the blocking effect? I'm sure this varies a great deal based on individual tolerance, length of time using, etc...one person says it's 4mg?

Four mg is cutting it close. On that maintenance dose I could feel heroin after waiting a full 24hours but the effects werent all there. For some reason I'd get the opiate high but not much a a rush(I shoot). Also I had to do at least two bags. at two mgs it should be no problem, I've never personally attempted to shoot dope while being on a stable 2mg bupe regimen but from all I've read online, that seems to be the safest number. On top of that IMO two mg is a great maintenance dose, you get a lot more agonist effects from the bupe alone, and you can get high on top of it

Suboxone has a half-life of about 36 hrs so you can crunch the numbers to get a rough idea as to when Suboxone's
blockade effect will no longer be in place.

There's much more to it than just when you took your last Suboxone dose: chronic opiate administration leads to
down-regulation of the opiate receptor(s), and this effect can last a LONG time, depending upon the individual, the drug,
and the period of administration.

I'm on 16mg subs for a year now, and as long as it keeps me clean i plan to stay on for life if i have to and can, why did you stop?

The whole when will I be able to get high question, is really in answerable. At 16mg a day, you will probably not be able to feel heroin for a few days. However, it's possible that you can shoot right through it. I've literally shot one bag of heroin twelve hours or less after dosing 24mg (and I had been on this dose for a month) and I got an insane rush and was stoned for hours. The next day I bought heroin from someone else, and it didn't do shit.

I think that if your at any dose above 6mg, you should really not even attempt to get high until you taper down to 2mg, at which point you will most likely be able to get full effects from full agonists, less that 24 hours from your last dose.

as an aside, I was not able to get off ANY dose of dope short of a bundle of fire or 60+mg oxycodone after using low doses of suboxone intranasally for a week or so, not every day. And the buzz would be small at best here. I would have to wait a week or so to get a nice kick out of full agonists. with a high enough dose of dope, you probably could catch a nice opioid buzz, but this would be on the tricky side given the sheer amount of dope you'd have to be using, and the problems the side effects of such might cause you. proceed down that route with caution...

If you feel like the suboxone doesn't last long in your system, you probably don't have to wait the full 72hrs to avoid p/w. although this would be pushing your limits, for some reason I can take a moderate dose of suboxone no less than seven hours after I came off a dope high (so 12hrs or so since I used the full agonist) and I will not experience any p/w. all I'm saying it that your probably will only have to wait a day at most to avoid p/w. maybe... again, proceed with caution...

now I'm on suboxone maintained. the other day I ran out early, and tried something... loperamide. I too two doses, first 120mg then about 90mg an hour and a half or so after. This the day after using suboxone, having been on 4mg sublingually twice a day for three-ish weeks. God knows why, but loperamide is like my new favorite drug. I was high like I never, ever could get using an agonist the day after taking suboxone. although, given loperamide's long half life, the day after when I got my script refilled for suboxone, I experience a mild case of p/w, which sucked, but was not really that bad.

I'm just amazed that the loperamide was able to get me quite high with suboxone technically still in my system from the day before. Not just that, it didn't leave me too constipated (Yes, I didn't shit for a day or two, but when I did I had no problems and didn't experience any constipation related discomfort in the means time).

my 0.02: take 200mg loperamide