Methadone question
Hi, I'm posting here because I didn't find any methadone mega-thread.
Anyway, I wanted to know a few things. First, let's talk about my background (sorry if it's long).
I live in France (a foreword: sorry for my English) and I never took heroin or other strong opiates, but I took large quantities of codeine orally for about 3 years in 2002/2005. Codeine is available in any pharmacy here in France without any prescription, a box of 20x15mg pills (=300mg without any other compound, APAP or anything, just plain equivalent codeine base) doesn't cost a lot (relatively).
So I took one or two codeine boxes a day during this period, which ended to be costly and not very good for my liver. Then, as I was helped in a drug center for my cannabis abuse (which is of no more concern today), I asked if I could benefit from the methadone which they dispensed too for the opiate users. They agreed and I was started at 20mg/day. A few years passed by and I asked to have more, finishing by taking 50mg/day.
Here comes the interesting thing: one day I decided I was fed up with this 50mg/day dose and I decided, without refering to the center, to drop from this quite large dose to 10mg/day. I did this within one day (sorry for my English if it's not very clear: 50mg/day to 10mg/day in one day).
I know this was
risqué at the least, but to my surprise I didn't feel any
discomfort whatsoever, and 25 days after having cut back the dose, I told my methadone-doctor the truth and gave him back the 25 methadone vials of 40 mg. He was astonished. As I never experienced any discomfort whatsoever (really, not even bad nights -nothing), he told me I was an exception.
So I'm now at 10mg/day, and there' something I'm sure of, I happen to have a very long methadone metabolism: there has to be at least 4 (four) days before I begin to feel a little edgy (I began to have a restless legs syndrom after the 100 hours mark, which I stopped by redosing). To be honest, I never went beyond these 4 days without redosing, so I just don't know how the withdrawal could look like, let's say after one week without methadone.
Anyway, I'm not intending to stop methadone because I don't want to go back to codeine. But if I
had to stop for whatever reason, I want to be on the safe side and I'm planning to go from 10mg/day to 1mg/day. I know this won't be a problem (well I hope so), but my question is: Is stopping cold turkey from 1mg/day somewhat problematic? Will I have some discomfort, even if minimal?
As you know after reading my long text (sorry for that), I could take some codeine or/and some loperamide to minimize the problem, but there's something absolutely certain: I don't want to go back
abusing codeine.
So maybe it's better to stay at the 1mg/day mark, even if it's for the rest of my life, but it's so tempting to stop, knowing I did cut my consumption from 50mg/day to 10mg/day without slowly reducing and without any problem, and knowing that I can take nothing during 4 days without any discomfort at all...
I'm a little bit lost here and your input would be very welcomed. Thank you for reading all that
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