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Bupe buprenorphine patches

I have been prescribed these for over 4-5 years now and I find them great. I get a Mail away Authority where you get 28 days supply and also 2 repeats (Australia) they keep the repeats at the Pharmacy. best thing I have ever used for pain. they have been known to work the best for Lower Back Pain than most other forms of pain. I know a couple of people given them for Hip pain when waiting to get a hip replacement but aparently they dont work so well. there is a way to extract these for IV use and it works Extremely well but the rules say I cant give this information out and you get such a High amount out of them it would be very easy to overdose on these and not only is it an antagonist to other Opiate/oid drugs it is also a antagonist to Noloxone and it needs to be administered fairly fequently to keep you alive. I almost OD'd on it once by accident but luckily I slept it off so I didn't take quite enough to kill me but it wasn't much of the mix. woke with spew everywhere!! this is a strange drug it only works via Sublinguil, Transdermal or Intraveinus it doesn't work at all orally. aparently there is a IV version that has just came out for hospital use only called buprenex or something.

I am on 2 patches a week so I get suplied 4 + 4 (total of 8 Patches) per Month. I was instructed to get a safe and have it bolted to the Studs in the wall.
I also keep my Benzodiazapines in there also. this was sugested to prevent theft.
 
Patches are very popular in central Europe. You can get nearly all bupe of them by soaking required part of them in vial of 2-3ml pure ethanol or pure methanol and extraction goes better without any water. I think that after 24hrs you have most of bupe in solution. You can now slowly evaporate half of alcohol by heating it up, add 5-7 ml water and boil it until you will have 2ml left. In this way you have 2ml of liquid without any alcohol in it as alcohol evaporates much faster than water and after boiling 1-2ml of alcohol with 5-7ml of water all alcohol will evaporate. You can either shoot it if you was sterile enough or soak a bit of cotton pad and put it under your tongue. Methanol seems to bit better solvent but ethanol works very well. You have to calculate the dose of bupe by cutting patch in pieces ie. if you have 40mg patch (do not look at mcg/hr as it is not important, every patch have total qty of bupe in leaflet or on the box) and you want 5mg you need to cut 1/8 of patch etc. You can also simply put piece of the patch to your mouth and keep it for 40-60 mins without swallowing but it has much lower BA (I think roughly 30% of calculated dose) and it is difficult to keep it without swallowing for so long. Better is to use extracted bupe from cotton pad as is absorbed much much faster in your mouth and simply works stronger. You can also plug it in but unfortunately I cannot tell much about this ROA. Anyway I've heard it is really good and close to iv with rush and onset. There is a special thread about so it is definitely worth mentioning.

Methanol boiling at 65 °C, 338 K, 149 °F
Ethanol at 78.37 °C, 352 K, 173 °F
Water at 100 C

Even if you will heat it up to 80C alcohol will boil and evaporate with max speed, much quicker than water and water will not.
 
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I have been wearing my first 5 mg patch for a week as directed and it worked really well for my pain, very happy with them. I just now removed the active part from the used patch and it is under my tongue. How long should I keep it in my mouth? I'm not likely to overdose doing this am I? I have a small opiate tolerance.
Hope I can get my doc to keep giving me these, she has been so mean with pain killers.. these are super-effective compared to the codeine or tramadol which is all she's allowed before.
 
Update: I sucked, chewed and held it against my gums for about 2 hours in the end because it wasn't doing anything. The membrane/matrix has started to disintegrate and come away from it's plastic backing. I could scrape it off and eat it, little worried about how toxic what it's made of is?
Think I'm kind of feeling something now, but it is mild and rather unpleasant.. very unlike other opiates I've tried (which is most of them). I'm a bit cross-eyed and anxious, not euphoric at all. I'd like to take a little valium to counteract this edginess, which I get from Tramadol as well (yuck), but already panicking about ODing so probably not wise (although I don't feel sedated at all).

Edit: I also threw up 2 or 3 hours after I stopped sucking on it. This is weird because a) I didn't feel that high, and b) I never puke from opiates, even large doses. Still feeling nauseous this morning. Don't know if I'll try this experiment again..
 
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butrans patch

Im on 20mcg/hr for chronic PM. Seems to be working until about day 5. Does anyone else have this prob? Im sick of my BT meds lortab 10/500 been on for yrs and just keep gobbling w no real PM benifit. Any thoughts?
 
^^Buprenorphine is just a really powerful drug, and by eating the patch you ate more in ~2 hours than your body received in the entire week. I had these patches and would do the same. If you do the math, there's something like about 75% (if memory serves me right) of the drug left after you wear the patch for 7 days.

And I've only thrown up twice from opiates in the 5 or so years I've been using, and I've done my fair share opiates (started with oxy 80s..moved onto opana 40s...now unfortunately heroin). both times were from buprenorphine. And the half life of the drug is so long that you're "hung over" the next day
 
Thanks for link gabaking. Doesn't seem like any of them know what they are talking about tho maybe cause thread is from 08. Bupe dosed like this doesn't block other opiates. Also it works great for 5 days then its lacking. Just hate that I will run out b4 month is up if I switch every 5 days and it brings to? If I do switch @ 5 days then im sure bupe plasma levels will stay high enough to do trick on severe chronic pain if I don't switch will levels be cool or am I going thru 72 hour build up cycle weekly? Im not sure im basically not wanting to be in pain as all of us feel. Don't like tabs cause they don't work any more and I just keep eating them to stop pain but that doesn't work so I guess im screwed
 
hey GABAking, thanks for the input but I'm still confused. I have about 5 years experience with opiates also, and used to have a small but serious morphine habit. These days I could handle an OC 80 (a little worryingly as I only weigh 40 kg), but it would make me quite high. This didn't. It was more of a ...poisoned feeling than anything. I wondered if perhaps consuming whatever plastic-y gunk the matrix is made of is what made me sick? If not, I'm interested in what is pharmacologically different about bupe that I only got a mild toxic, almost speedy feeling from a supposedly high dose?

painhater- I'm sorry to hear the patches aren't working for you. They manage my injuries/chronic pain really well, and I am on a much lower dose than you. I get no perceivable mental clouding and no breakthrough pain until around the 5th day, as you say. Regular strength codeine+paracetamol tablets eased that kind of. But I'm just happy to have something that works most of the time.
If I am allowed to stay on these I also plan to leave a day or two in between applying a new patch, in an attempt to reduce tolerance. I would put up with pain for a few days in exchange for these continuing to be effective long-term!
 
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hey GABAking, thanks for the input but I'm still confused. I have about 5 years experience with opiates also, and used to have a small but serious morphine habit. These days I could handle an OC 80 (a little worryingly as I only weigh 40 kg), but it would make me quite high. This didn't. It was more of a ...poisoned feeling than anything. I wondered if perhaps consuming whatever plastic-y gunk the matrix is made of is what made me sick? If not, I'm interested in what is pharmacologically different about bupe that I only got a mild toxic, almost speedy feeling from a supposedly high dose?

I think your history answered the question. Buprenorphine doesn't really give the typical high that full-agonist opiates do, and given your history with morphine and other opiates, I'm not surprised you thought the high was lacking ("toxic"). That speedy effect you talk about is part of the high. Bupe is weird...for an opiate naive person, 1-2 mg and the person is floored while for someone like me, 12-16 mg IV doesn't really do what I want it to in terms of getting me stoned. That's just my .02
 
Ah, I thought it would be something to do with full/partial agonists, but I don't entirely understand that stuff. Thanks.

Painhater - just a thought, do you live somewhere very warm or do anything else that might make the bupe release faster, and therefore run out quicker? Pressure does it too - I often sleep on my stomach and i have the patch on my chest, and I've noticed I'm waking up pinned as fuck from lying on it.
 
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I have 10mg buprenorphine patches and have chewed them out of the package have not gotten sick and felt basically nothing. Just over a week ago i was able to chew 75 fent no problem i have since come off the fent worst time of my life.
 
After saying I wouldn't do it again (chew on used patch), I did, of course, do it again. Every time actually, out of the 6 or so patches I've used. Damn lack of self-control. It has been more enjoyable on subsequent experiences, still not a great high though. I find opiates in general funny like that, you have to kind of know what to expect before you can enjoy it.. But anyway, I think I should probably stop doing it, because:

1. I'm still concerned about how toxic / carcinogenic / generally bad for you the plastic it's made of its. Although I have removed the active bit from the adhesive backing, because it takes so long to kick in it is usually in my mouth for several hours, and by the end most of the matrix has come off the plastic and been swallowed.

2. (Probably more importantly) I'm worried it's fucking up my tolerance (even more). Usually work it like this: wear patch for week, remove and spend a day sucking on it, go without for 2-3 days, apply new patch. It's not cutting my pain as well as it was a couple of months ago, which is to be expected I suppose, but this can't possibly be helping.
 
... no breakthrough pain until around the 5th day, as you say. Regular strength codeine+paracetamol tablets eased that kind of. But I'm just happy to have something that works most of the time.

How long have you been on the patches? I've been on them since 2009 and found that after a while, the effects got more stable right through the 7 days; have heard it might be because you end up with little 'reservoirs' of bupe that soaked into the skin in all the previous spots the patches have been, so there's a little going into the bloodstream from other spots as well. (Not 100% sure that's correct though, so take it with a grain of salt.)

That said, my GP in Australia told me one of his other patients only got 6 days reliable pain relief off the patches even after using them for a while, and was able to get a special authority to write her prescriptions for one patch every 6 days instead. So it is a known medical thing, that different people get different results on the patches; your doc might be able to do something similar, depending on the rules where you are?

Or you could ask for some low-strength bupe sublingual, to top up when the patch is almost out. Or I also found tramadol helpful for the odd occasion when my patch ran out early, for managing the withdrawal symptoms. Useless for pain, though!

If I am allowed to stay on these I also plan to leave a day or two in between applying a new patch, in an attempt to reduce tolerance. I would put up with pain for a few days in exchange for these continuing to be effective long-term!

That's actually a really bad idea. Part of why the patches work so well, even on quite low doses, is that the pain relief is so steady. I tend to worry about tolerance too, and used to take myself off pain meds as soon as I could grit my teeth and bear it. Got told very strictly by one of my docs to take the meds when I needed them; letting the pain get out of control before I'd touch them meant I was taking far more overall, and getting far less effect, than if I just kept on them steadily. "Keep ahead of the pain" was his advice. I think that's part of why they put me on patches to begin with; much less discretion in when/if I took my meds!

Also the more pain disrupts your day-to-day activities, and the longer it's allowed to, the less likely you are to ever fully resume your pre-pain life. Having 3-4 days out of every 9 when you're in really severe pain sounds pretty disruptive to me.

I'm really lucky that I haven't had much tolerance problems, even after years on the same strength patches (although I do let them wear off enough on patch-change-day for my gut to clear itself out, after being a bit blocked up all week) but if you're really worried about it, ask your doc; I doubt they'd recommend a 'drug holiday' more than every few months to reset tolerance levels, not every week like you're talking about!
 
Wow. If I had to rely on (only) buprenorphine for pain control, I'd be in deep shite...I had daily injections of the .25 IV ampules
for a period years ago, the pain relief was minimal but it also helped take your mind off of it. To an extent...
 
SydneyGal, I'm aware of all the points you raised there, and they are all true, but I have been in virtually unmedicated severe pain for years. This was the first time I had ever managed to get anything stronger than panadeine forte / tramadol out of my GP and you would not believe the shit I had to go through to get them. There is no way I will get a stronger dose or anything to top up with. I spent 6 hours at a pain clinic the other day and the doctor talked about taking me off even these in a few months. :(
I assume you're from Australia, are Sydney doctors somehow more informed about pain relief than Melbourne ones? Because most of mine would rather leave me suffering / worsening my condition than give me decent meds, it seems..
 
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