Now having spent 9 months on the program, buprenorphine is something I began to hate. I hate the fact every day I have to put a pill under my tongue and hold it for 15-30 minutes. I hate it because it's like taking levothyroxine for hypothyroidism - you can't feel it, but if you stop taking the synthetic hormone, you'll soon start feeling terribly tired and drowsy. And it's the same with buprenorphine but consequences of taking it are really bad... Right now I'm somehow making it on 2mg, but every few days I have to take a higher dose to maintain the same level of "maintenance". I want to get off it as I feel I can do without buprenorphine and without opioids at all (well, if I can abstain totally, there's nothing like "one hit" when you're an opioid addict...). But the problem with tapering down persists. I now have only 8mg pills because I went abroad, so this was the only way to get me enough amount of Suboxone for the whole period of my stay. This is another obstacle - what if I were to stay abroad for a year? I would need such an amount that my doctor couldn't give me or would have to put some ridiculously high dose into my patient's card.
It was a godsend, because I wouldn't have made it through PAWS from methadone without an opioid. And Suboxone at the very beginning eliminated the withdrawal completely. But now it kind of scares me how tolerant I became to opioids in general. At the beginning I would literally feel how it numbs my pain, stronger than morphine or other classic opioids, but without the nodding euphoria. Now when I get a headache, there's nothing that helps me but marihuana... I don't even wonder how bad it would be having got off buprenorphine. I know it'd be hell on Earth, not better from methadone withdrawal at all, different, but I once had to stop Suboxone for a few days because of constipation. When the W/D started for real, I drank so much lactulose that my stool was pure water...
Even after all these years I still am of the opinion that there is nothing comparable to morphine's warmth, the feeling of being understood, safe, blablabla... Really, I'm sorry to admit that mentally it was closer to me than 99.9% of people I met in my life and had some relations with. It's more of a psychological problem for me now than physical, buprenorphine holds it somewhere in the middle, thus I'm fine. On the contrary, I've got a physical problem coming off benzodiazepines - I don't want to take them, I can feel how they make me sadder etc., but if I stopped today, I couldn't get up the day after tomorrow.
However, I still have some hope. Back in the days when I was in my young teenage years, I started from dissociatives. Yes, my peers at the same age either smoked marihuana or snorted amphetamine (not to mention alcohol) and I found relief in cough pills. Later when I got to ketamine, I realized I wasn't really playing with dextromethorphan, because it was readily available (actually it's as readily available as codeine here) but because it helped me with the pressure. I bet getting very deep with ketamine (or something less "clinical") once again could "reset" me from this deepening depression and the feeling of hopelessness.