Bupe Staggered Tapering - A method to rapidly reduce tolerance?

[Doktah]

Hi all,

So I'm currently tapering off of Suboxone, and I have a question - which may have implications on how I taper my dose, and how others may as well.

Say you reduce your dose of Suboxone (or other drug) from 2mg to 1.5mg, and your receptors upregulate at a given speed, after which your tolerance has now adjusted to the lower dose... say it takes 5 days for your brain to - mostly - adjust to a 0.5mg reduction in dose... If you instead dropped your dose to 0.5mg for 2 or 3 days, and then brought it back up to 1.5mg on the 3rd or 4th day, would your receptors have now adjusted to the 0.5mg reduction in a shorter amount of time?

In other words, I want to know if the rate at which your opioid receptors upregulate is at all dependent on the size of the dose reduction? For example, if it takes ~5 days to adjust to a 0.5mg dose coming from a 2mg dose, but it takes the same amount of time to adjust to a 1.5mg dose, then logic would indicate that you could taper your dose more rapidly by first reducing your dose by 2 - 3x the amount you ultimately intend to reduce by (say 1.5mg in my example), and then bring your dose back up to the target dose, and your receptors would already have upregulated to that point.

I hope I am explaining this well enough... there may be better terms for me to use to describe this, but I am not aware of them... I would call this "staggered tapering", since you are reducing your dose by a large amount for a short amount of time, and then bringing it back up to the target dose you were aiming to reduce to. In my mind, I feel like this may be a legitimate way to rapidly taper your dose on a drug, although you may be condensing the misery of the 5 day adjustment period into 2 or 3 days, therefore making it pretty rough... But I would gladly endure short-term agony to speed up the adjustment period personally.

Any comments? Does anyone know if the difference in dose between your original dose and your target (lower) dose has an impact on how quickly your brain overall upregulates it's receptors? Has anyone tried something similar - with or without success? Theoretically, if you simply stopped taking Suboxone for two days and then started again, this would be basically the same as what I am talking about here - assuming you restart the medication on a lower dose.

 

[black kat]

Not sure if this works with bupe,but as far as heroin is concerned,if you instantly go from a 2 gram/day habit to a 0.5 gram/day one,and stay there for a couple of days,then when you up the dose to 1.5gram/day your tolerance will surely be reduced,and you might even get a buzz(whereas if you went from 2grams to 1.5,youd get nothing),so theres that.

Thing is though,those 2-3 days youll prolly feel crappy and maybe even sick(WD),and the bupe's nature is to keep you maintained and stable,so reducing your dose by that big amount wouldnt be advisable,especially since it can initiate cravings for other drugs(which the subs try to keep you off).

In other words,id do it(and have done it in the past) with other opiates in order to reduce tolerance/save some $$$/give my body a break,but not with bupe,as id fear about jeopardizing my "sobriety"(in this case sobriety=abstinence from heroin) and fucking up my whole maintainance schedule.

 

[Doktah]

Perfect, good to know.

Honestly, no matter what I reduce by, I always feel like shit... and Bupe has never once curbed my cravings for drugs (not even opiates) - it just makes me refrain from using them since they wont get me high. It sounds like this may work, and honestly, the suffering would be a worthwhile compromise to me.

 

[Treefa]

That's exactly how I feel on bupe^.
It doesn't get you any kind of a buzz, to speak of(unless your a toddler maybe...and some of them might not even get 1!), but it makes it much more POSSIBLE to live without opiates. Less is always more with bupe, but I always eventually get up around 3-4 mg and end up having to get back down to the comfortable 1.5-1mg dose.

I did real good last week, made a whole strip last from Friday to yesterday (wedsnay) which is something I've never done before.

Right now I've got 1 8mg strip wrapped in Xmas paper (along with about 20 hydros and about 3/4 gram of some stong herb), the problem is I won't even let myself entertain the thought of opening any of it before the 24th! It takes some gotdamn self-control, lemme tell ya! Especially when I woke up this morning with nothing, besides a little shake and 3 tramadol

So my current supplies are as follows; 1 10mg Norco(i'll probably just take it now...already had 5 so wtf why not), maybe 1gram of regular weed shake. 27 $, of which 20 will be spent on 1 more 8mg sub, which I will use to make it UNTIL Christmas.

So I have to make it 13 days...God willing i'll have a sub sometime tonight. So that's 8mg to last 13 days...i'm thinking doing about 1mg Until Sunday the 14th, then .5mg until the 24th. that's 10 days X .5mg = 5mg, so perfect calculations, it's just a question of willpower now.

I've made up my mind, that if I HAVE TO, i'll just Kick up until the 24th....so a pretty hellish week seems a fair comprise for a marry little Christmas...i'd just hate to be kicking on the Christmas holiday, my poor family just wouldn't know what the fuck to do.

Anyways good luck OP, we'll all get thru it somehow, even if we don't know how just yet.

 

[Treefa]

I'm pretty sure I don't remember anything about up/downregulation of receptors...tad advanced for me.

But my theory is that, if you take sub everyday, you'll have quite a bit built up in your system already, which will make it EASIER to taper to lower doses, since you have kinda a cushion to fall back on(the bupe that's been in your system for a while already).

It's interesting to me that bupe has a 24(actual like 36-72) hour half life, but the effects fade each day...I guess because we're used to having a dose everyday, hell if I know.