Bupe Suboxone/Buprenorphine FAQ and Megathread v.1; 2007 - 2010

[Modnaro]

Least painful Suboxone ween possible?

Ok so basically I am on about 8-10 mgs a day of Sub atm. I missed my last appointment twice now, and in general really I kind of want to stop having to rely on this pill simply to just escape the withdrawls, and also because Subs and me for some reason dont mix well as in the Bupe just makes me REALLY REALLY REALLY lethargic, apathetic, and I generally have been sleeping like 14 hours a day. But any way my plan is to use the last 15 pills I have and do something that looks like this,.. Day 1 (today)- take 2 4 mg halves one already taken, and the last one around 10-11 PM tonight, Day 2 - same thing. Day 3- one half in the morning, a quarter at night. Day 3- same thing. Day 4- Quarter in morning - Quarter at night. . Day 5- repeart , Day 6- Quarter in AM, a 1 mg piece at night.. Day 7- same .. Day 8- 1 Mg Piece AM, 1 MG piece night, Day 9- repeat, Day 10 - 1 mg piece - when ever taken, Day 11 same thing. Days - 12 , 13, 14, 15 ... - from then on I will try and just take like little 0.5 mg slivers that get smaller and smaller until I feel like I can jump off the sub..

After I get off the bupe, I will procure a bottle of about 60 50 mg Tramadol and for the following week I will start at a dose of 200 mgs and slowly bring myself down to <25 mgs,., I just wanted some input on this, any one have a better idea? What degree of w/ds should I expect, and just anything else, also Xanax could also possibly be had to assist with this but I was trying to avoid that.

 

[MemphisX3]

just drop your dose, tell your docotr that you feel lethargic etc. and ask him to adjust your dose, if you just jump off you are risking relapse. if 8-10mgs is making you feel like that ask him to drop you down to 4mg and see how that feels. just trust him and be honest he will help you out....







there is no need to go out on your own and get tramadol and add another drug to the mix, it just isnt needed in this situation

 

[thelung]

Hey just wanted to let you know that I was on Suboxone one time for about 60 days at 8mg per day and I stopped cold turkey and it really wasn't that bad. Everybody is different though and I'm not trying to say that this would happen to you if you stopped the same way, I just wanted to put it out there as information you might want to know hey good luck.

 

[polio vaccine]

actually i was holding the spit because i was told that the pill has to absorb sublingually, cus if you were to swallow it there would be no effect. i thought if i swallowed the spit i would just be wasting the whole pill, and like i said, nobody at my outpatient had answers for me either (cus they're all just counselors and not nurses or anything, and the psych who prescribed me never gave me a thorough explanation about that).

so, no, i'm not trying to avoid the naloxone; i rather like having that safety buffer, because the last thing i need in my life right now is to relapse on dope. i just didn't know the proper way to take them sublingually, and holding all that spit in my mouth didn't really seem right.

but thanks for the information---and thanks for your opinion.

 

[DangerChamber]

How do you get rid of the naloxone. I wanna be able to shoot these. =P

 

[Trigeminal]

day 8 of no opiates at all. i only took suboxone for 3 days after being on around 300mg of hydros for 1.5 years.

it has been just as difficult as we all know it always is. most of the physical symptoms have subsided but now i'm experiencing some relatively hardcore depression and irritability. i know this is also to be expected but it's such a difficult thing to get through the day with. i am forcing myself to try and get out and do as much as i can even though climbing a flight of stairs makes me feel like my heart is going to explode.

this forum is helping me with the day to day struggles, i can't thank you guys enough. but i just can't wait to be "normal" or at least somewhere close to that state of mind. i hate this feeling so much.

thankfully i do have support from friends and just this morning i told my dad about what has been going on and although i don't think he can fully comprehend the idea of being addicted to opiates he let me know he would be supportive of me as well.

such a tough road. i commend anyone who has been able to kick this shit for good. i have all the right intentions for wanting to be clean and am determined to keep pushing through knowing that there is light at the end of the tunnel but this just... sucks.

Keep it up man, you're doing a good thing. My one suggestion is that these forums may not be the best place to spend your time. Keep up the good work! You will most likely have rough patches here and there, but the worst of it is definitely behind you, and life will only get better. I know that posts like yours help inspire me.

 

[Pegasus]

How do you get rid of the naloxone. I wanna be able to shoot these. =P

The naloxone idea sounds good on paper, but does not actually work like that. The bupe will still work just fine if injected. Please use proper IV technique and micron filters if you end up doing this.

 

[Peanut21]

u sud be able to just stop takin subs after awhile and not have withdrawals ive done H for years off and on and after weeks of useing raw H i only need like 5 subs and im good. most of it is mental the initial withdrawals aren't but after a few days its mental

 

[rolls_]

actually i was holding the spit because i was told that the pill has to absorb sublingually, cus if you were to swallow it there would be no effect. i thought if i swallowed the spit i would just be wasting the whole pill, and like i said, nobody at my outpatient had answers for me either (cus they're all just counselors and not nurses or anything, and the psych who prescribed me never gave me a thorough explanation about that).

so, no, i'm not trying to avoid the naloxone; i rather like having that safety buffer, because the last thing i need in my life right now is to relapse on dope. i just didn't know the proper way to take them sublingually, and holding all that spit in my mouth didn't really seem right.

but thanks for the information---and thanks for your opinion.

I've found theres bugger all difference if you snort it, crush and put under tongue and swallow basically straight away or putting a whole tablet under your tongue and slowly swallowing the spit.

I think you could just swallow it whole and it would have only a slightly diminished effect.

 

[polio vaccine]

really! hm, cus that's the one piece of advice i did uniformly receive from the psych and the counselors--that if you swallow the pill it won't have any effect.

come to think of it though... i remember one time when my girlfriend and i were on an amtrak to california, and we ran out of dope on the train...it being a train across the country, we clearly had no chance to score more dope....

i knew very little about suboxone then, but i believe we did swallow them that day and experienced some relief..... although i know i didn't exactly feel great, and we took the whole 8mg each, after giving 24 hours to let the kick go into full effect.... so i mean, 8mg helped, but not totally, when gulped down like a regular pill.

we just didn't know about the sublingual thing, because the person who gave us the subs just said they would help with w/ds, and we should take them 24 hours after our last dose. she didn't say anything about sublingual administration or sniffing them or breaking them into several chunks. and as i recall, it worked somewhat, but maybe not as well as 8mg should have worked

so i'm inclined to think that swallowing them does diminish the effect appreciably.... i mean, months later i wound up buying them to try and kick dope, and at that point i'd been told you could sniff 2mg chunks and get relief from as little as that, so that's what i did, and i experienced relief.... and i definitely had a bigger habit then than when we were on the train.

but crushing them up and putting the powder under your tongue sounds like a good idea, for sure. i know sniffing has a higher bioavailability, but like i said, my nose has been through some abuse over the years and i'm trying to leave it alone.

but yeah, thank you, i'll try mashing the pills up first

 

[rolls_]

really! hm, cus that's the one piece of advice i did uniformly receive from the psych and the counselors--that if you swallow the pill it won't have any effect.

Personally I think the counsellors and even doctors know jack shit about how it feels. They all read from exactly the same text and have never personally tried it. A large percentage of this thread use sub daily and in many different forms, personally I would take their experiences over what the docs say any day.

 

[Captain.Heroin]

Effective at getting you a rush? or effective at holding you?

Both, I used to vomit daily when I took Suboxone sublingually. When you vomit before the pill is dissolved, it doesn't hold you that well and then you wasted really expensive medicine too.

Personally I would say oral is more effective as you only need to dose once per day, you are however injecting 3-4x I think I read? Not to mention you just stick a tablet under your tongue, don't need to stick a needle in your arm.

I guess my point is surely it will be a lot easier to jump off if you are just use it under the tongue, if you are IVing you also have to kick the mental habit of using a needle. Not having a go, I just think that it would be a big step towards getting clean personally.

It'll be easier for me to quit IVing it. I can taper to 0 and then switch over to placebo (or a different drug since I have had no problem with drugs except heroin). Sublingually speaking, there's only 2 other drugs (both benzos) I use the sublingual ROA for (other than LSD), so sublingually tapering off of Suboxone would personally be more of a challenge for me.

I live in Australia so I assume no such luck.

Leftwing said there's an Australian equivalent.

I can't verify that, I live in the US.

day 8 of no opiates at all. i only took suboxone for 3 days after being on around 300mg of hydros for 1.5 years.

it has been just as difficult as we all know it always is. most of the physical symptoms have subsided but now i'm experiencing some relatively hardcore depression and irritability. i know this is also to be expected but it's such a difficult thing to get through the day with. i am forcing myself to try and get out and do as much as i can even though climbing a flight of stairs makes me feel like my heart is going to explode.

Why not stay on Suboxone for 2-3 weeks max to help be less depressed and irritable than "hardcore"? If you don't want to then you're almost out of the woods! You just need to wait it out, maybe take an antihistamine and/or a benzo to help with the lingering WD effects.

Good luck on quitting! BL is a great resource for people who are getting over an addiction.

hey, i apologize if this question has already been answered here, but i did some searches and i couldn't find any relevant responses--

i recently got scripted to suboxone and i can't get an answer from my outpatient people about this:

when i take it sublingually, do i have to hold the spit in my mouth until the whole pill is dissolved?? i have been doing that thus far, and then swallowing the spit once there's no more pill under my tongue, but it's just kind of gross having a mouthful of spit for ten minutes.

i asked elsewhere on another forum and one person said i don't have to save the spit, but another person said i do. like i said, i have been saving the spit thus far.

so do i have to do that? i know i can sniff it too, but my nose is a little beat up already and i'm trying to sniff things rather sparingly.

i know i can iv it too--tried that once--but again, i want to protect my veins these days. plus i'm being supervised by a million different people and i can't afford to have a ton of tracks.

so yeah, about the spit:

answers are appreciated......thanks in advance!

If you want to, you can use some hard liquor underneath your tongue with the pill, so that it dissolves 10x quicker. Plus you get a BA boost.

Or, you can chop up the pill into sections, and use one section at a time until it's all dissolved. Hope this helps!

no you don't have to hold all the spit in your mouth. i think some people do this because the bupe is absorbed through your mouth whereas the naloxone is digested when you swallow it.

The naloxone is absorbed as well with any ROA, it is inert due to buprenorphine's affinity for the mu-opioid receptor.

but if you're doing that to avoid the naloxone then (in my opinion) you shouldn't even be on a drug like suboxone.

Your body avoids the naloxone, unless you are rare enough to have a hypersensitivity to it.

How do you get rid of the naloxone. I wanna be able to shoot these. =P

*sigh*

You just shoot it. The naloxone does nothing. You want to use a micron filter if you can, but they are very much so IVable. The naloxone helps keep your opiate tolerance down if anything, it has no adverse reaction (unless you are a rarity and have a hypersensitivity/allergy to naloxone).

The naloxone idea sounds good on paper, but does not actually work like that. The bupe will still work just fine if injected. Please use proper IV technique and micron filters if you end up doing this.

Thank you.

really! hm, cus that's the one piece of advice i did uniformly receive from the psych and the counselors--that if you swallow the pill it won't have any effect.

The oral bioavailability of buprenorphine is 10%. Sublingually, it's more like ~30%. Orally speaking, you would have to take a lot more to get to the same place. It is not 100% ineffective orally though.

i know sniffing has a higher bioavailability, but like i said, my nose has been through some abuse over the years and i'm trying to leave it alone.

but yeah, thank you, i'll try mashing the pills up first

Snorting it only has 50% BA. That's not much more effective than the sublingual ROA, plus 98% of Suboxone (the 8mg pills) is not buprenorphine. So snorting Suboxone is less efficient than taking it sublingually (hence why I either take it sublingually if I don't IV).

 

[WARDMAN3]

I was in detox for a 40-80mgs of oxy/hydro at the beginning of the month. I started at 6mgs of suboxone and weened down to my last dose 6 days later. I felt fine the first 3 days. I did get some mild withdrawals on day 4. It was bearable and nothing like the physical and emotional wd of hydro or oxy withdrawal. It lasted a few days, but my mindset was much better to deal with it.

 

[Magic_Hobo]

what was your suboxone regimen in the detox?

 

[Captain.Heroin]

le merged

-> Suboxone Mega Thread

 

[Thursdaybreeze99]

Does suboxone raise your tolerance to other opiates such as Heroin?

After being stabalized on suboxone for a couple of weeks after a heavy period of every day iv heroin use, would ones tolerance for h be raised by being on the bupe?would it be lowered? Or simply not effected?

 

[Captain.Heroin]

-> Suboxone Mega Thread

it depends on how much you use.

I would say after a few weeks, it's probably somewhere around the same or slightly lowered.

Stay on Suboxone for another month or two and slowly taper your dose. Then you'll probably be a lot closer to having a much lower opiate tolerance.

 

[askaboutme]

captain, you missed the shot, notmerged!

 

[Captain.Heroin]

captain, you missed the shot, notmerged!

hehehe

I beat you by 2 minutes.

 

[asouthern]

Why not stay on Suboxone for 2-3 weeks max to help be less depressed and irritable than "hardcore"? If you don't want to then you're almost out of the woods! You just need to wait it out, maybe take an antihistamine and/or a benzo to help with the lingering WD effects.

Good luck on quitting! BL is a great resource for people who are getting over an addiction. if i had to do it over again i would do it this way, for sure. i simply wasn't very well informed on how suboxone worked when i decided i would just take if for a few days after kicking hydros cold turkey. i'm now at day 12 of no hydros, day 9 since my last 4mg dose of suboxone and i feel marginally better but still pretty rough. just so exhausted all the time. doing anything at work is incredibly difficult and my appetite has not come back yet although i am forcing myself to try and get as much protein in my body as possible.

it's too bad i can't really pinpoint a specific day that i will feel "normal." i'm generally a very happy person but this is so incredibly draining.

side note: i just over heard my boss talking about being prescribed norcos for his recent surgery. i realize that i will have to deal with hearing people talk about that sort of thing around me but it's just fascinating when and where the random reminders come from.