Hi SoCal, thanks for posting your experience. I’ve found this thread interesting to read and will continue to follow it. I wish you the best of luck with your taper, you can do it. Just remember that any uncomfortable feelings or symptoms are temporary and they will go away eventually, and keep focused on your end goals. You’ll get there
I was abusing opiates for about 4-5 years. When I wanted to stop and found I couldn’t I got onto methadone as well, my maintenance dose ended up being 75mg/day I believe. Maybe 80mg, somewhere in that range. At that time Suboxone (which is a mix of buprenorphine and naloxone) had been suggested to me as a better alternative, but it was still under patent so it would cost about 3x per day what my methadone cost.
Eventually Suboxone lost its patent (drugs can be patented for 20 years, or 25? I think it’s 20), and it became much cheaper, so I switched to it. I went down 5mg of methadone each week until I was at 30mg/day, then had to stop taking it entirely for 72+ hours (to avoid precipitated withdrawal) before starting Suboxone. My maintenance dose of Suboxone is now 16mg/day. It comes as 8mg buprenorphine + 2mg naloxone, so I take two each morning. It’s also available in 2mg/0.5mg pills, so you can get a dose which suits you best in 2mg increments. You could probably even do 1mg increments since it is a sub-lingual pill, making it very easy to cut in half. But anyways, if you do switch to Suboxone you should do this with your doctor, just sharing my experience.
DXM (Dextromethorphan) and Ketamine are classed as dissociative anesthetics. I’m not sure why toothpastedog asked about those, so I’ll let him answer that.
Thanks again for sharing your experience. Best of luck, you’ll get where you want soon!