"My love is a fever..."
Hey,
I’m a greenlighter myself and went through a 10-12 year period of full time, "professional" heroin use, so I know a little bit about where you’re coming from. Matter o fact, the 1st place I ever did heroin was in Bellingham… I know, you couldn’t get much farther away from Spokane and still be in WA, but it is technically in the same state. Anyway, I got off the shit for several years and then stumbled into some oxy’s, hydrocodone HLC, and my personal fav. Dilaudid (hydromorphone). Stuck in the middle of nowhere, 200 miles from a methadone clinic, I found suboxone, and basically, it saved my ass and my life.
My impression is you are on the young side, or at least this is your 1st go around with H. IMO age means shit, but if it is your 1st time trying to get off dope or dealing with a methadone clinic, there may be some good (?) advice I can give you. 1st thing that comes to mind is your comment about how to get out of the methadone clinic. Unless you’re court ordered to go to that clinic and no other, getting out of a methadone clinic is simple: quit paying them. They may let you slide for a few days maybe even a week or two but eventually they will quit dosing you.
2nd thing that sticks out in your post is the clinics refusal to quit your titration. It’s been years and I know they have guide lines about how fast and how much you can cut your dosage, (I was more concerned with how fast and how much they’d increase my dose.) but if you’re concerned about your ability to afford 6-12 months of methadone treatment, I got bad news for you… suboxone is expensive. I don’t want to dissuade you from pursuing sub, just prepare you for reality. There may be options available to you through free clinics or pharmaceutical company subsidies, so don’t give up just yet. Anyway, getting the shit off the street is only going to be even more expensive than a prescription.
3rdly, if you’ve been chipping and still going to the methadone clinic, then you know methadone floods your opiate receptors and hangs out there for a while. Meaning you do dope while there’s any methadone still in your system, you don’t get as high, so, it makes you want to do more… but it won’t work the way you want it to and is likely pretty dangerous if you want to go on living.
The last bit of sagely advice I can offer is this: near as I can tell, the debate rages on over whether it’s harder to cold turkey H or methadone. Only time I have ever been successful going cold turkey (more or less) off of either of them has involved incarceration. Pray you don’t ever go through that!
Spokane is big enough you should have no trouble finding private doctors to prescribe suboxone. (I just googled it and found 2 doctors in Spokane and that was just 1 of 206,000 results.) Whatever you choose to do, good luck and be safe.
An afterthought: suboxone contains buprenorphine and nalaoxone. The one is only a partial opiate agonist and will never give you the high of other opiate/opioids. The other is an opiate antagonist and will not only limit the amount of bup you can absorb, but also make chipping H or any other opiate pretty much completely useless. It’s also really hard to misuse the stuff in any way. This last bit is of no concern if you’re serious about wanting to get clean.
