Opioids Here's How I Tapered Painlessly Off Methadone

[pandamnit-in-fl]

UPDATING WITH A HALF-LIFE CHART:

If you're worried about tapering off methadone, I discovered a completely painless way to do it.

My clinic wanted to drop me from 5 mg to 0 because their dispensing machine doesn't measure lower amounts. Note: the FDA recommended drop-off dose is 2.5 mg, but they allow up to 5 mg, so if you're in a smaller town your clinic is unlikely to own the more expensive low-dosing dispensers.

I got to 5 mg and stayed there for a few weeks waiting for the arrival of methadone pills I ordered from a darknet vendor in Europe who had great reviews. It was about $95 for 7 40mg pills. My background is biochem and I graphed the half-life of my taper over time - the reason you won't feel pain is I slowed the taper down so that the amount you drop every few days IS LESS THAN the intra-day swing that naturally happens as you metabolize. The difference between the taper a clinic will do and mine is that the clinic drops you MORE than the intra-day swing. There is no reason for that other than laziness I suppose.

I bought a 0.5 ml pipette (dosing) and a 5 ml pipette (water for solution) off Amazon. You will need to measure 40 ml of water - get a pipette for this, DO NOT USE MEASURING CUPS or pouring devices. This is a taper, we need to be accurate. I bought the glass one that has what looks like a little red condom over the pull end, It was like $4. No need for expensive ones, but more on pipette technique and what can go wrong at the bottom.

Using sanitized take-home bottles, empty one 40 mg pill into the bottle. If your pill is a different concentration, welcome to the world of stoichiometry. You'll need to do some basic math here. Ask someone for help if you are unsure. Measure 40 ml of distilled water with your larger pipette and add to the bottle with the pill content. Use distilled water, you need to get all the chlorine out of the water, it will screw things up if you don't. Before you dose, read the description at the bottom about how I contaminated a bottle (it was disgusting) AND REFRIGERATE AFTER USE. Some filler crap is in the pills, you'll need to navigate around that or use cotton to suck it up.

IMPORTANT - this mix is a different concentration than clinic liquid methadone, which is 10 mg / 1 ml (40 mg / 4 ml if we were mixing it with our pill). Our solution is a 10x dilution of that (40 mg per 40 ml). Our solution makes the mg and ml easy - 1 mg is 1 ml.

I'm currently at 0.40 mg. When I hit 2 mg, I dropped 0.10 mg every 4 days. I started feeling that a bit at ~ 1 mg, so I started dropping 0.05 mg every 4 days. I feel a tiny, tiny bit off in the AM but I'm not even sure it's not in my head. I actually forget I'm tapering and will forget to dose.

So when I say I dropped 0.10 mg, how much solution did I measure out? 0.10 ml. It's the same. Easy.

Technical stuff:

• Write down your doses on a schedule, be diligent
• Write the concentration on the bottle and be careful measuring, mixing, and emptying the pill over a dish so you don't lose any. You'll want to be as accurate as possible, but don't get OCD measuring.
• I pipetted directly into my mouth - I ruined one bottle of solution because it got infected with bacteria from my mouth because I wasn't refrigerating the solution or cleaning the pipette.
• I chose to start at 5 ml because that was as far as I could taper at the clinic. However this taper can be applied at any start point. 10 mg is where many people start to feel the taper. Here's how I'd taper from higher amounts, based upon the half-life metabolic curve, but it's up to you:
  • 15+ mg = .35 every 4th day​
  • 10 - 15 mg = .25 every 4th day​
  • 5 - 10 mg = ..15 to .25 every 4th day​
  • 3 - 5 mg = .2 mg every 3-4 days​
  • 2 - 3 mg = .1 to .2 every 3-5 days​
  • 1 - 2 mg = .1 every 4 days​
  • .5 to 1 mg = 0.05 mg every 4 days​
  • .15 to .5 = 0.025 mg every 3-4 days​
  • to zero = 0.01 at your pace.​
  • ​

This is the overkill taper - for those of us who have to be highly functional at work and can't take time off or don't want quality of life to suffer, this is your solution. It works beautifully. You could accelerate this if you wanted to. I began dropping every 48 hours at first, then slowed down when my body felt it. If your drops are small enough, you can do them more often in case you are wondering why the clinics drop you less frequently. Again, it comes back to the fact I designed the half-life sum drop difference to be LESS THAN the intra-day swing. For example, someone maintaining at 5 mg will have a daily peak ~ 6.7 mg (in system) roughly 12 hrs after dosing, and a daily low of about 3.3 mg at 24 hours. So your body is seeing ~ 3.4 mg variance throughout the day. You feel pain when you go through the 3.3 mg floor. Barreling through that with a clinic-designed 1 mg drop is a kick in the balls to your receptors. My gentle .15 drop is more like a nice squeeze on your nuts while being blown. Think of it like that.

While I haven't yet jumped off, I can tell you going from 45 mg to 43 mg at the clinic was far worse than anything I've experienced since doing this myself. The clinics don't really care about us, there is no reason why a gentle, more humane taper like this is not available.

I really hope I can spare anyone facing a taper some pain. I'll be here for you if you need any help!

 

[negrogesic]

I dropped off at 5mg one time and it was suprisingly severe. 21 days of acute withdrawal. Nice approach.

 

[JackARoe]

Yeah I had a friend that tapered off painlessly too and this person was sort of a hypochondriac. But similarly he got down to 1 mg and stayed there a week or two and then even .5. mg. When he jumped he had mild withdrawal for a couple of weeks but claimed it was easier than he thought.

Me? I got arrested, had just told my private methadone clinic to go f*ck themselves (they were bully's) and jumped at about 30 mgs and it sucked for 6 weeks. Actually I told my clinic to go screw themselves and then needed 8 bags of H a day to stay well. Then after a week of that I got arrested and kicked the methadone and H in jail.

Slow and steady works with a lot of things.

 

[Lawless69]

Wow thanks for that. Now its beeb 5 weeks off uk heroin today n can sit in a room of people smoking and dosent bother me one tiny bit! No eggateration ive always thought it as dirt since i quit 17 years ago n only got back smoking it to come down off the crack
So now atm am sat taking 90mls daily increasing if i wisb om the 26rh my next appointment. But im not so sure now I thought about maybe gki f 30ml more up to kinda help more in my head for the kicking the crack so that would mean i quit both on 120mls of methadone this way,
How bad and long are the withdrawals?

Surly surly no way near as bad as jumping from 25mcg fentanyl per hour fkr 2 years to zero and no confort meds. Wow how did i get through that

Just how bad isit from personal experience?

 

[pandamnit-in-fl]

Wow thanks for that. Now its beeb 5 weeks off uk heroin today n can sit in a room of people smoking and dosent bother me one tiny bit! No eggateration ive always thought it as dirt since i quit 17 years ago n only got back smoking it to come down off the crack
So now atm am sat taking 90mls daily increasing if i wisb om the 26rh my next appointment. But im not so sure now I thought about maybe gki f 30ml more up to kinda help more in my head for the kicking the crack so that would mean i quit both on 120mls of methadone this way,
How bad and long are the withdrawals?

Surly surly no way near as bad as jumping from 25mcg fentanyl per hour fkr 2 years to zero and no confort meds. Wow how did i get through that

Just how bad isit from personal experience?

If you're asking how bad the withdrawals on my taper are - I don't feel them. I graphed the half-life curve and designed this taper so the amounts you drop, and the resulting half-life stacks following, are within the daily fluctuation range you are used to. I understand this is difficult to believe. Maybe I should create a template for the taper, and post the graph so people can customize a taper to their needs.

Dude, I hear you on the fentanyl wd. Mine was so bad I literally hallucinated for hours - I just heard the sound of myself screaming and when I finally came out of it, the rooms was disgusting. You don't want to know.

It sounds like methadone is helping you bro, it certainly normalized my life signficantly. But when the time comes to taper off, it is bad but I haven't experienced much of it for the reasons above. Just remember, no matter what you hear, that there is a way to do this painlessly. And I mean, painlessly to the point I forget that I am tapering.

 

[pandamnit-in-fl]

I dropped off at 5mg one time and it was suprisingly severe. 21 days of acute withdrawal. Nice approach.

Your clinic couldn't bring you any lower either? I researched the FDA's recommendations and confronted my clinic with it. I gave up on them with the doctor told me that the half-life is 72 hour

If you're worried about tapering off methadone, I discovered a completely painless way to do it.

My clinic wanted to drop me from 5 mg to 0 because their dispensing machine doesn't measure lower amounts. Note: the FDA recommended drop-off dose is 2.5 mg, but they allow up to 5 mg, so if you're in a smaller town your clinic is unlikely to own the more expensive low-dosing dispensers.

I got to 5 mg and stayed there for a few weeks waiting for the arrival of methadone pills I ordered from a darknet vendor in Europe who had great reviews. It was about $95 for 7 40mg pills. My background is biochem and I graphed the half-life of my taper over time - the reason you won't feel pain is I slowed the taper down so that the amount you drop every few days IS LESS THAN the intra-day swing that naturally happens as you metabolize. The difference between the taper a clinic will do and mine is that the clinic drops you MORE than the intra-day swing. There is no reason for that other than laziness I suppose.

I bought a 0.5 ml pipette (dosing) and a 5 ml pipette (water for solution) off Amazon. You will need to measure 40 ml of water - get a pipette for this, DO NOT USE MEASURING CUPS or pouring devices. This is a taper, we need to be accurate. I bought the glass one that has what looks like a little red condom over the pull end, It was like $4. No need for expensive ones, but more on pipette technique and what can go wrong at the bottom.

Using sanitized take-home bottles, empty one 40 mg pill into the bottle. If your pill is a different concentration, welcome to the world of stoichiometry. You'll need to do some basic math here. Ask someone for help if you are unsure. Measure 40 ml of distilled water with your larger pipette and add to the bottle with the pill content. Use distilled water, you need to get all the chlorine out of the water, it will screw things up if you don't. Before you dose, read the description at the bottom about how I contaminated a bottle (it was disgusting) AND REFRIGERATE AFTER USE. Some filler crap is in the pills, you'll need to navigate around that or use cotton to suck it up.

IMPORTANT - this mix is a different concentration than clinic liquid methadone, which is 10 mg / 1 ml (40 mg / 4 ml if we were mixing it with our pill). Our solution is a 10x dilution of that (40 mg per 40 ml). Our solution makes the mg and ml easy - 1 mg is 1 ml.

I'm currently at 0.40 mg. When I hit 2 mg, I dropped 0.10 mg every 4 days. I started feeling that a bit at ~ 1 mg, so I started dropping 0.05 mg every 4 days. I feel a tiny, tiny bit off in the AM but I'm not even sure it's not in my head. I actually forget I'm tapering and will forget to dose.

So when I say I dropped 0.10 mg, how much solution did I measure out? 0.10 ml. It's the same. Easy.

Technical stuff:

• Write down your doses on a schedule, be diligent
• Write the concentration on the bottle and be careful measuring, mixing, and emptying the pill over a dish so you don't lose any. You'll want to be as accurate as possible, but don't get OCD measuring.
• I pipetted directly into my mouth - I ruined one bottle of solution because it got infected with bacteria from my mouth because I wasn't refrigerating the solution or cleaning the pipette.
• I chose to start at 5 ml because that was as far as I could taper at the clinic. However this taper can be applied at any start point. 10 mg is where many people start to feel the taper. Here's how I'd taper from higher amounts, based upon the half-life metabolic curve, but it's up to you:
  • 15+ mg = .35 every 4th day​
  • 10 - 15 mg = .25 every 4th day​
  • 5 - 10 mg = ..15 to .25 every 4th day​
  • 3 - 5 mg = .2 mg every 3-4 days​
  • 2 - 3 mg = .1 to .2 every 3-5 days​
  • 1 - 2 mg = .1 every 4 days​
  • .5 to 1 mg = 0.05 mg every 4 days​
  • .15 to .5 = 0.025 mg every 3-4 days​
  • to zero = 0.01 at your pace.​
  • ​

This is the overkill taper - for those of us who have to be highly functional at work and can't take time off or don't want quality of life to suffer, this is your solution. It works beautifully. You could accelerate this if you wanted to. I began dropping every 48 hours at first, then slowed down when my body felt it. If your drops are small enough, you can do them more often in case you are wondering why the clinics drop you less frequently. Again, it comes back to the fact I designed the half-life sum drop difference to be LESS THAN the intra-day swing. For example, someone maintaining at 5 mg will have a daily peak ~ 6.7 mg (in system) roughly 12 hrs after dosing, and a daily low of about 3.3 mg at 24 hours. So your body is seeing ~ 3.4 mg variance throughout the day. You feel pain when you go through the 3.3 mg floor. Barreling through that with a clinic-designed 1 mg drop is a kick in the balls to your receptors. My gentle .15 drop is more like a nice squeeze on your nuts while being blown. Think of it like that.

While I haven't yet jumped off, I can tell you going from 45 mg to 43 mg at the clinic was far worse than anything I've experienced since doing this myself. The clinics don't really care about us, there is no reason why a gentle, more humane taper like this is not available.

I really hope I can spare anyone facing a taper some pain. I'll be here for you if you need any help!

I dropped off at 5mg one time and it was suprisingly severe. 21 days of acute withdrawal. Nice approach.

And yet the doctor at my clinic said, "it's nothing" and proceeded to tell me how some people drop from 130 mg cold turkey in jail, "and they were fine."

This doc always makes me think of that joke, "what do they call someone who graduates last from the worst medical school in the country?".

Doctor.

 

[pandamnit-in-fl]

Yeah I had a friend that tapered off painlessly too and this person was sort of a hypochondriac. But similarly he got down to 1 mg and stayed there a week or two and then even .5. mg. When he jumped he had mild withdrawal for a couple of weeks but claimed it was easier than he thought.

Me? I got arrested, had just told my private methadone clinic to go f*ck themselves (they were bully's) and jumped at about 30 mgs and it sucked for 6 weeks. Actually I told my clinic to go screw themselves and then needed 8 bags of H a day to stay well. Then after a week of that I got arrested and kicked the methadone and H in jail.

Slow and steady works with a lot of things.

I've come off twice the same unfortunate way you did. Man it sucks, flipping around with on that concrete. If you're still being processed, you've got to share a toilet in a room with like 25 people in it.

 

[JackARoe]

I've come off twice the same unfortunate way you did. Man it sucks, flipping around with on that concrete. If you're still being processed, you've got to share a toilet in a room with like 25 people in it.

Total hell. I felt like I was hallucinating. An overcrowded bird cage. So 3 toilets for about 75 people for the first few weeks. The only thing a jail will give someone so sick is that stupid drink called a grasshopper which is seroquil and does nothing. I came out and was thrown in a court ordered rehab after a month in Keystone Pennsylvania, an old supposedly haunted castle. But it took almost 2 months to feel 100% normal. I can say thouugh I laughed my ass off in rehab with some funny fuckers. In group a person once said "all you mother f*cking crack heads with all that energy keep it down so us junkies can get 10 minutes of sleep at night" lol.

 

[negrogesic]

Your clinic couldn't bring you any lower either? I researched the FDA's recommendations and confronted my clinic with it. I gave up on them with the doctor told me that the half-life is 72 hour

I actually never told them.

I pulled a bizarre stunt since i was given take homes in pill form once every few months. At that time i was down to 240mg a day (from 380mg). It was a fancy clinic that catered to Hollywood elite so they were extremely accommodating. They once gave me 5 months of methadone to take me with me when i went on an extended trip to Australia. Their big thing was anonymity. Patients never saw one another and were buzzed into a series of waiting rooms. Sometimes you'd see someone in the elevator though.

Thing is i tapered myself off slowly but never told them so i collected 24 pills a day for a long time as i slowly dropped to zero.

Then i showed up one day and told them, thanks guys im done. They looked shocked and said, "oh you'll be back". Thing is i never did go back.

Of course since it took me along time, in the process i had acquired a number of thousands of pills of methadone, probably with a $50,000 street value given the sheer number. I didn't touch them for over 3 years and finally got into it and developed a bit of a habit eventually as my dosing got too close and i wound up readdicted. Still wasn't as bad as the first time as the dosing never got above 60mg/day or so but the withdrawal wasnt fun.

 

[Painreliefplease]

I’m doing this and it’s going great. I’m at 0.625 mg/day. The only difference is that I dose 2-3 times a day. I’ve pushed it a couple times and tried to go a little faster, and I really did not feel well.

You’d think that the last few milligrams and micrograms wouldn’t matter so much, but I’ve found that they really do.

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

Whilst I applaud your scientific approach to your taper, all you have to do is take it fuckin slow and easy.

I eventually jumped off at 1mg/day with absolutely no adverse symptoms. But by the time I got to that level I was seriously pissed off with the whole bullshit of picking up my script.

Obsessing over your dosage just indicates an unwillingness to let go...

 

[Painreliefplease]

You don’t sound very supportive FUBAR. How come?

I’m a pain patient and don’t have difficulty controlling my use, and I’m also a weenie about feeling bad. I was on tons of meds for 11 years before my neck surgery and am soooo close to being done after almost 2 years of gradually getting off about 8 different meds. This is the last one.

I assure you that I am very sick of tapering. I would have loved to be done with this a long time ago, and I am doing my best.

 

[LucidSDreamr]

I can maintain at 1 or 2 mg per day currently.

I would love to get off. I just take as little as possible to feel well and work. But I never seem.to get way down to fractions of a milligram

 

[LucidSDreamr]

I actually never told them.

I pulled a bizarre stunt since i was given take homes in pill form once every few months. At that time i was down to 240mg a day (from 380mg). It was a fancy clinic that catered to Hollywood elite so they were extremely accommodating. They once gave me 5 months of methadone to take me with me when i went on an extended trip to Australia. Their big thing was anonymity. Patients never saw one another and were buzzed into a series of waiting rooms. Sometimes you'd see someone in the elevator though.

Thing is i tapered myself off slowly but never told them so i collected 24 pills a day for a long time as i slowly dropped to zero.

Then i showed up one day and told them, thanks guys im done. They looked shocked and said, "oh you'll be back". Thing is i never did go back.

Of course since it took me along time, in the process i had acquired a number of thousands of pills of methadone, probably with a $50,000 street value given the sheer number. I didn't touch them for over 3 years and finally got into it and developed a bit of a habit eventually as my dosing got too close and i wound up readdicted. Still wasn't as bad as the first time as the dosing never got above 60mg/day or so but the withdrawal wasnt fun.

I'm way too scared to throw away my collection of methadone pills but scared ill get re addicted assuming I ever get off my current 1 mg per day.