I'm on 100 mg's of lope a day and have been for about 2-3 years. I'm trying to taper off the lope fairly qiuickly and onto the suboxone (2 8mg's per day). Does anybody have any advice? Do I even need to taper the loperamide or would I be ok jumping off of it completely and right onto the suboxone? I guess I could play with it and figure out if I feel sick or not but I'd like to know if anyone has any experience doing this.
Why switch to subs? Loperamide is still pretty easy to get OTC. And you could taper at any speed you like instead of having some undereducated Dr tell you the sub wds are nothing.
As for a tapering plan..... first transition to a 8 or 6 hour dosing schedule and immediately cut your dose down to 80 mg per day. You will feel wds on day one, but not horribly. Stay at 80 mg for a week (5 days if youre really desperate to quit). The regular dosing will help you to feel less hopeless when the wds hit.
Cut your doses by by 25%(per day, recalculated again at each step) every 4-5 days. Its a game more of percentages than milligrams. Sometimes for me it helps to cut by 1/2 on the day and cut by the next 1/2 on the next day.
Ex: Day 1-5,80mg. Day 6,72mg. Day 7-10,64mg. Day 11,58mg. Day 12-15 ,51mg. Day 16, 46mg. Day 17-20, 41mg. Etc.... This is 20% drop from that days current dose every 5 days with a one day transitioning period at the start of each 5 day period. It is important that your drop be calculated from the current dose, not from the starting dose or you will suffer more and more as you get lower and lower.
I have been using this exact method and it has truly worked over and over for me with Loperamide. If you are in a rush you can increase to 25% every 4 days but beware:
Oxy wds are mostly better by the 7th or 8th day from cold turkey(depression lasts for a while but the physical effects are much better after a week). Loperamide has acute wds that last around 8 weeks. You wont get off this in the same way people get off heroin or other opiates. Onset of relief from a dose takes around 4 hours on an empty stomach, and todays dose will effect your doses for the next two or three days. If you think you can just be strong and go faster then most likely you will suffer badly enough to go right back to your 100 mg per day(or worse, since you will have at that point been starving yourself of lope for days, you may need 150mg to feel ok) Your body will hurt, your mind will be scrambled, and the subs wont take it away for days or weeks.
THE LAST THING YOU WANT IS TO BE A WEEK INTO YOUR SUBS AND START TAKING LOPE AGAIN. Loperamide has a way of knocking out other opiates. And lope wds can make it feel like you havent taken anything else to make it better. Dont take this seriously and you will end up with a suboxone addiction to go with your lope addiction.
Again.... why not taper off lope slowly and avoid the subs all together?