Bupe Suboxone/Buprenorphine FAQ & Megathread v2; 2010

[jamesBrown]

For people who are opiate tolerant(for example.....a heroin/oxy addict who recently started a suboxone maintanence plan)....it takes some time for you to be able to take such tiny doses of bupe(i.e....0.2-0.5mg's)...and enjoy the euphorical properties. Depending on the person and there particular tolerance level and amount of time using opiates....it could either take a short while, or a long time to become well adjusted to such a small dose. For me, it took a couple weeks from being at 2mg's/day to go down to around 0.5mg's/day and start feeling the euphoria from the even lower dose.

But, for example, I gave about 0.2-0.3mg's of bupe sublingually to a friend of mine who use to IV heroin but hasn't used opiates regularly for several months, and he got EXTREMELY high for a couple hours and then got sick from overdosing on only a tiny dose of bupe.He threw up for about 12 more hours. Its easy to forget how potent bupe really is(~40x's stronger than morphine).....so its understandable that one would be suprised at the euphorical and analgesic effects one can get from such tiny doses.

 

[DkBlaze1]

YO with me i also thought that 2 mg was the spot and for me it was to a degree... I find cimetidine is really good at mmaking it stronger to a point this is the active ingredent in tagament. the acid reflux stoper. any way I today went from 2 mg a day to 1 mg a DAY I dosed 2 times both time i got a noticeiable effect. as good tho as the 2 mg a day except the sick part was it worked as fallows. . 5 shot in morning aka (2 pm ) i know thats not morning but ive been sleeping my life away as of late.. and a .5 shot at 9 and then i just wanted to take one more and did .5 and i ggot the same effect all 3 times and now its midnight. any way i know that makes a day total of 1.5..

I find for me the best way to lower my dose is to cut my dose in half and then take that 3 times the first day of lowering it and then go back to my regular morning and night dose. to get most euphoria . this was my way to do it from 4mg - 2mg and same with 2 to one. so after i get down to a flat one mg a day im going to dose like this for a week then I m going to go down to .5 a day .25 shot twice. and my hope is I will b able tto take that . 25 shot like 3-4 times a day if I so choose and get amazing effects from it.

I hope this helps some one I know no bodys asked me ? I just am stating my thoughts because I kept wondering how long after I lower my dose I will feel the up tick in positive effects and I have come to find that I get the good effects almost right away when lowering. But I will tell it like this havein just had my last shot of the night I FEEL JAM DIDY and its almost unconfy heavy like on my sholders and chest. Like shotting morphine.this is the only way I havev become abnle to get true true opiate like feeling that causes me not to feel like I needa go buy dope. By all means this is not the best thing to b doing but i think its better then heroin and I will be off this shit With in the year.

I have not felt withdrawls at all while lowering my dose... except one day mid day when coming from 4 to 2 but I think it was cotton fever ... haha be safe love life and get on subutex insteada subs because naloxone is an endorphine blocker its why u dont feel happy or sad ...

 

[adder]

I have not felt withdrawls at all while lowering my dose... except one day mid day when coming from 4 to 2 but I think it was cotton fever ... haha be safe love life and get on subutex insteada subs because naloxone is an endorphine blocker its why u dont feel happy or sad ...

Actually, that would be the action of naloxone given to a person who's not addicted to opioids. What really kills production of endogenous opioids is using agonists as body "sees" receptors are taken, it "thinks" endogenous opioids are not needed and stops producing them as it should. The effect of this can be seen during the time after quitting using opioids and becoming clean. Algesia is another symptom of not enough endogenous opioids. Naloxone actually does little to nothing theoretically when it's given with buprenorphine for a long period of time (it can't have an action on opioid receptors because they're taken by buprenorphine so it's just supplying oneself with doing almost nothing drug spending its time in a synapse and then being cleaned out fast, vide naloxone's T1/2).

 

[jamesBrown]

Actually, that would be the action of naloxone given to a person who's not addicted to opioids. What really kills production of endogenous opioids is using agonists as body "sees" receptors are taken, it "thinks" endogenous opioids are not needed and stops producing them as it should. The effect of this can be seen during the time after quitting using opioids and becoming clean. Algesia is another symptom of not enough endogenous opioids. Naloxone actually does little to nothing theoretically when it's given with buprenorphine for a long period of time (it can't have an action on opioid receptors because they're taken by buprenorphine so it's just supplying oneself with doing almost nothing drug spending its time in a synapse and then being cleaned out fast, vide naloxone's T1/2).

Yea, I wonder why some people have such negative opinions of the nalaxone in suboxone. I mean, since it cant outcompete bupe, its not really active, and I don't think I have ever noticed nalaxone effecting me in any way.....good or bad. Well, the only thinig I can imagine is maybe it causes headaches in higher doses of suboxone...I have felt that, but since bupe STILL has a stronger binding affinity, I think that it would probably be the bupe causing the headache, not the nalaxone.

 

[DkBlaze1]

http://pages.prodigy.net/unohu/endorphins.htm

just as something interesting^^^^^

But i ask people this if naloxone really has no effect to the degree people are going to talk about it,,, Then why DId i experince such negitive side effects that went away 3 days after getting on subutex ????,,, mind you im not argueing im just trying to get the the FActs...

 

[SubDude]

I'm at 4mg per day, though I take 2mg twice daily. Around 12 hours apart.

I wasn't thinking about being on Suboxone and Methadone together at all, but maybe the doctor would swap the Suboxone treatment to Methadone?

I mean, I don't see too much harm in low dose Methadone, the pain alone will have me relapsing if I don't get some relief.

If you live in the US most [if not all] private subs docs don't have license to prescribe methadone... in fact I've never found a private md who can script methadone for addiction. Always been thru a clinic with much more regs and monitoring. If I could find a methadone clinic with fees like I pay for subs [$0] I'd switch... if I didn't have to start all over with daily clinic visits.

 

[SubDude]

no shit you break it up, but honestly that's ludicrous. i'm not talkin shit to you man, i just don't get it.

As CapH mentioned try liguid method for low dosing. At one point I was down to .25mg and found mixing with water worked best. The only problem I had was for some reason the last dose or two [from 8mg pill] wasn't as effective so... I'd start over when I got there.

 

[jamesBrown]

http://pages.prodigy.net/unohu/endorphins.htm

just as something interesting^^^^^

But i ask people this if naloxone really has no effect to the degree people are going to talk about it,,, Then why DId i experince such negitive side effects that went away 3 days after getting on subutex ????,,, mind you im not argueing im just trying to get the the FActs...

I dont understand your link?? it doesnt say anything about nalaxone being able to still bind to your receptors(thus activating itself) when combined with bupernorphine.

As for your experience....you could be mildly allergic to nalaxone(very unlikely), you could of been responding to other inactives that are in the suboxone pill but not the subutex formulation. There are actually ALOT of variables that could have caused you to have such a negative side effect. For one, you could have simply been taking a dose that was too high or too low causing negative side effects when you were on suboxone, but when you switched to subutex, you changed the dose, even slightly, and it corrected the problem.....I love small doses of suboxone, but I know that if I take any dose higher than 4 mg's I will get a headache and have general soreness all over my body.....this is because the antagonistic effects of bupe are more present the higher dose you take. Or it could have simply been a fluke that will never be explained.....you could try testing it by takin suboxone again, in the same doses you are taking subutex now, and see how you respond.

I wouldnt be so quick to make assumptions about the pharmacokinetics of nalaxone based on your one time experience with suboxone.

 

[Veruca Salt]

This is kind of off subject but has anyone
noticed that the longer Suboxone sits in a
cabinet the less effective it becomes? For
instance, I had about a bag/day of H
habit for about 3 months and stopped one
day and got on 8mgs of Sub a day for about
5 days and then quit taking the Subs all
together and was totally fine without any-
thing. Well, shortly after..a few weeks I
would say, I picked up my H habit again
using the same bag/day as before.
Well, there was one day I was unable to
score and I thought "Oh, no big deal, I
got all of these leftover Subs, Ill just
take one of those!" ... I tell you what,
that Sub didn't do shit to curb my W/D.
Not a damn thing. I found this quite peculiar
since before, it totally got rid of all
my W/D symptoms and was almost euphoric.
I thought maybe it was because the bottle
had been in my purse exposed to heat, being
jostled around, ect before making it into
my the medicine cabinet. Or like, maybe
it had a shelf life so to speak, that I
was unaware of? I ended up getting rid
of the rest of the Subs so at this point
its neither here nor there, I was just
curious as to what yall thought.

Anyway, I apologize in advance if the for-
mat of my post is kind of screwy. I'm
using the mobile version of BL. Thanks
Yall!

 

[jamesBrown]

I doubt the subs you had lost there potency over a period of just a few weeks as long as they were stored in atleast a mildly protective manner.(i.e. in a cabinet, away from light, heat, moisture)

More than likely the cause of the apparent loss of potency was simply that your tolerance had exceeded what it was when you prevoiously had used the suboxone. Even if you had only been taking the same amount of opiates, your tolerance could still have been higher....also, after taking the sub's the first time, your body could have built up a tolerance to them as well(or maybe just increased your opiate tolerance overall).

Whatever caused it, I highly doubt the suboxone pills actually had lost there potency. Especially in such a short period of time.

 

[Veruca Salt]

Yeah that's what I thought too. After all,
it had only been a few weeks. They were
exposed to like 100 degree weather heat
for a few days but I even then.

I hadn't thought about my tolerance going
up. That makes sense that my using Subs
even for that short period of time, raised
it a notch or two.

 

[DeLee]

^^^
In my experience if its not holding you at 16 its not gonna hold you at 24 unless you are one of the rare people that bupe seems to have a high ceiling for. At 24mgs the side effects become quite apeerant expect extreme constipation insomnia or whatever side effects you already have to get much worse. If you have to go to a clinic anyway I would just switch to methadone it is so so much more effective.

The ceiling effect kicks in at 32mg as far as i know, so max daily dose would be 4 8mg Subutex/Suboxone.

I want to give Bupe a chanse.. it keeps me pretty calm for a few hours and then i want to take another dose but I cant because I am not allowed to take home doses yet.

I just wonder if Methadone would be a better choice..

 

[jamesBrown]

Yeah that's what I thought too. After all,
it had only been a few weeks. They were
exposed to like 100 degree weather heat
for a few days but I even then.

I hadn't thought about my tolerance going
up. That makes sense that my using Subs
even for that short period of time, raised
it a notch or two.

People sometimes forget how potent bupernorphine is. Its around 40x's stronger than morphine if I remember correctly. Even though its a partial agonist, it can still provide very intense highs and increase your opiate tolerance tremendously.

 

[DkBlaze1]

I dont understand your link?? it doesnt say anything about nalaxone being able to still bind to your receptors(thus activating itself) when combined with bupernorphine.

As for your experience....you could be mildly allergic to nalaxone(very unlikely), you could of been responding to other inactives that are in the suboxone pill but not the subutex formulation. There are actually ALOT of variables that could have caused you to have such a negative side effect. For one, you could have simply been taking a dose that was too high or too low causing negative side effects when you were on suboxone, but when you switched to subutex, you changed the dose, even slightly, and it corrected the problem.....I love small doses of suboxone, but I know that if I take any dose higher than 4 mg's I will get a headache and have general soreness all over my body.....this is because the antagonistic effects of bupe are more present the higher dose you take. Or it could have simply been a fluke that will never be explained.....you could try testing it by takin suboxone again, in the same doses you are taking subutex now, and see how you respond.

I wouldnt be so quick to make assumptions about the pharmacokinetics of nalaxone based on your one time experience with suboxone.

^^^^ the suboxone dose i have taken has never been more then 4 mg so it can;t b i was taking to much and when i switch to the texs i never lowered my dose until at least 3 months after switching . My symptoms experinced with suboxone was I threw up every single day was unable to do anything. and I was consistently flat no happness no sadness no highs due to things that should have been giveing me such highs like Riding a motorcycle at 155 mph down the high way ect. things that would cause somemone to have endorphines released.

I also was on suboxone for 3 months before switching to texs.. I donno I really wonder why i felt the way i did..


as for the link it doesnt really have any bearing on anything except that endorphines are some sorta self made opiates and i thought that it would b a good thing to put on the mega thread so people could have easy acess to it... pretty much everything that i have misunderstood of thought that was the case but learned other wise i learned on my own and its taken a long time and has been really confusing over 100 hours over 200 prolly of hours searched looking for information and facts on suboxone. anyway i just put that there because I was under the assumtion that naloxone blocks endorphines which it does but the reason it does has to do with the fact that naloxone is a endrogonous opiate...

 

[DillFreak]

Let us know how much you pay! This is the only thread we are allowing outside of the 2010 Price Thread as of right now, and it is excluding street prices.

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=510176

I pay $6.00/pill for 8mg Suboxone at Costco, and $7.00 at the clinics dispensary.

 

[jamesBrown]

The ceiling effect kicks in at 32mg as far as i know, so max daily dose would be 4 8mg Subutex/Suboxone.

I want to give Bupe a chanse.. it keeps me pretty calm for a few hours and then i want to take another dose but I cant because I am not allowed to take home doses yet.

I just wonder if Methadone would be a better choice..

I would stick it out with suboxone for as long as you can before trying a methadone treatment plan. Methadone is more addictive than suboxone and has even worse withdrawals. Its a full-agonist therefore it is more likely to keep you in that "drug using" mindset. Many people simply take a dose of methadone that is much higher than they need so they can get some sort of high. People in that scenario are extremely addicted to methadone and it would take an extremely long taper plan to get off.

I am on suboxone maintanence and I only take 0.5 mg doses a day....much tinier than I am prescribed and much smaller than what most people take....yet it is MORE than enough to make me feel great and actually gives me euphoria at the low doses because of the full agonist metabolite norbuprenorphine. And...because im on such low doses, I can stop taking the suboxone anytime I want with no withdrawals, I choose to still take it because of its anti-depressant and euphoric preoperties.

 

[jamesBrown]

as for the link it doesnt really have any bearing on anything except that endorphines are some sorta self made opiates and i thought that it would b a good thing to put on the mega thread so people could have easy acess to it... pretty much everything that i have misunderstood of thought that was the case but learned other wise i learned on my own and its taken a long time and has been really confusing over 100 hours over 200 prolly of hours searched looking for information and facts on suboxone. anyway i just put that there because I was under the assumtion that naloxone blocks endorphines which it does but the reason it does has to do with the fact that naloxone is a endrogonous opiate...

nalaxone only blocks endorphines when it is actively attached to a receptor....which it CANNOT do when combined with bupernorphine. Therefore....when you take suboxone, the nalaxone in the pill has NO POSSIBLE WAY of blocking endorphins.

 

[DkBlaze1]

The ceiling effect kicks in at 32mg as far as i know, so max daily dose would be 4 8mg Subutex/Suboxone.

I want to give Bupe a chanse.. it keeps me pretty calm for a few hours and then i want to take another dose but I cant because I am not allowed to take home doses yet.

I just wonder if Methadone would be a better choice..

I really don';t understand why people say that the ceiling is at 32 mg thats just the legal limit. now in my area they say the ceiling is at 24 mg. But all of this to me has been a bunch of bullshit I have found through my own use that the celling effect starts to take effect at 4 mg and with the european kind of bupe they say its at 400 micrograms so i donno.. I am very confused by this in my mind ceilin effect would b once the dose to responce curve levels out.. so for most people on this site that I have read that is around 4 mg I donno tho mabye i m wrong too. I could b wrong with the definition of ceil ing effect ...

 

[jamesBrown]

I really don';t understand why people say that the ceiling is at 32 mg thats just the legal limit. now in my area they say the ceiling is at 24 mg. But all of this to me has been a bunch of bullshit I have found through my own use that the celling effect starts to take effect at 4 mg and with the european kind of bupe they say its at 400 micrograms so i donno.. I am very confused by this in my mind ceilin effect would b once the dose to responce curve levels out.. so for most people on this site that I have read that is around 4 mg I donno tho mabye i m wrong too. I could b wrong with the definition of ceil ing effect ...

yea when they say "ceiling effect" they are talking about the dose level where there is no increase in ANY of the effects of the medication....that includes the effects of "decreased respiration"...."analgesia"....etc...

its a little bit more complicated than you are assuming.


Ive never heard of the ceiling dose being anything but ~32mg's. Everyone is different and supposedly it varies slightly, but in general they say the ceiling effect is reached at apporoximately 32mg's.

 

[DeLee]

I would stick it out with suboxone for as long as you can before trying a methadone treatment plan. Methadone is more addictive than suboxone and has even worse withdrawals. Its a full-agonist therefore it is more likely to keep you in that "drug using" mindset. Many people simply take a dose of methadone that is much higher than they need so they can get some sort of high. People in that scenario are extremely addicted to methadone and it would take an extremely long taper plan to get off.

I am on suboxone maintanence and I only take 0.5 mg doses a day....much tinier than I am prescribed and much smaller than what most people take....yet it is MORE than enough to make me feel great and actually gives me euphoria at the low doses because of the full agonist metabolite norbuprenorphine. And...because im on such low doses, I can stop taking the suboxone anytime I want with no withdrawals, I choose to still take it because of its anti-depressant and euphoric preoperties.

Thanks for your reply!

Yeah I will try and stick to the Suboxone for now, maybe it would be different if I had the oppurtunity to redose at the afternoon..

Anyway, both Methadone and Suboxone maintance is free where I live and both Sub and Methadone maintance is viewed on as a life long treatment.