It's amazing how more people don't do drastic tapers before they plan to withdraw, because the difference it makes is significant. However, I certainly understand why. When you're addicted to an opiate, tapering is usually harder than actually quitting. When you have the opiates in your possession, come hell or high water you're going to do them, and more often than not you're going to consume more than the day before, not less. Tapering is "unnatural" when you're in a psychological state of addiction. Hence, why it's so hard to do.
However, after many unsuccessful attempts at tapering over the ebb and flow of my own addiction (I always stopped with suboxone (and Kratom before my tolerance started getting out of control), but at high doses of full-agonist, it's not always super easy), I finally did a successful taper and I was ....STUNNED how effective it was. My most recent episode was about 240-300mg of Oxy per day, for about a month. I tried to go at it cold turkey, and I was so sick there was no possible chance of me making it through. Instead of reaching for the subs as I've done so many times before, based on circumstances at the time (was on vacation with X amount of Oxy left, no subs, and no access to anything other than what I brought), I tapered down to 120mg per day, in two daily doses, and sustained that for 5 days, then cold turkeyed. I can't even tell you how much less sick I was. Don't get me wrong, I was still extremely uncomfortable, but it was, in retrospect, as easy of a cold turkey as I've ever had. It felt at least less than half as severe as my initial attempt at cold turkeying, say, perhaps 1/3rd of the original magnitude.
Tapering works. The hardest part is sticking to it.
* To clarify, I would have never been able to stick to a taper unless I was in the situation I was in. I planned it that way. Long vacation with the wife as a way to force myself out of my habit. She knew what I was doing and was proud of me, so that helped. We were on a tropical island, so the surroundings also helped tremendously. I brought X amount of Oxy with me and knew I'd have no access to anything except codeine (which I never even bothered with) down there, so given the circumstances it was surprisingly easy to stick to the taper. I flew down still at about 300mg / day, and by the 5th day I had stopped with the last day's total at 120mg.
I managed to stay clean only for a month, but my current habit is much less severe (60-120mg / day) and I have plans to make another go at quitting.
