Suboxone is so hard to get off. But I finally did. Here’s how

[AlexPK]

My story. I was popping hydros and oxys for many years after multiple back surgeries. That fairly quickly turned to half pain half recreational use. Then after a few years the pandemic hit and I was in a tough emotional spot with small kids. I started mixing with booze and popping pills 3 times a week. Probably a lot of your stories. Any who, at some point I was ready to be done. In July 2023 I told my doctor I had been abusing my prescription and to not give to me any more.

I never had a single physical withdrawal. But I knew the mental cravings would be fierce. So I immediately switched to full time kratom which I had been using on my off days. Not a single withdrawal. Kratom did the trick. So the story ends there, right?

Well, eventually I came clean to my wife about everything that transpired. 6 years of popping pills and now a year clean off of them. Just kratom to fill in the gap. Well, she wanted me off of the kratom. Fuck.

Before you get too mad at her, I was taking A LOT. I’d eat 10 powerful extract gummies per day at least. Every day. I never popped pills half that frequently. Anyway, I quit kratom a couple times. It was always the same:

Day 1- really tired at the end of the day and went to bed at like 8pm
Day 2- have some blues/depression
Day 3- totally fine

That 3 hour half life (which I knew nothing about half lives when I started my journey but wish I did) is golden.

Back to my story. My wife wanted me to quit kratom. Friends who work in addiction medicine recommended suboxone. It’s the “gold standard.” Guaranteed to work. They were right. In Sep 2024 I started suboxone. Worked great for a couple months. Had the similar mini high to kratom, but I was often sleepy when sitting still (watching tv, going to church, etc). I was ready to stop suboxone. Or was I?

I had NO IDEA how impossible it is to get off suboxone, even after only 6 months. I was never physically addicted to anything until suboxone. Trying to quit was one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. Started easy. 8mg to 6mg took 3 days. 6mg to 4mg took 3 days. Figured I’d walk off from there. BAD IDEA. Death like withdrawals for 3 days. Came back at 2mg and did that for a month. Tried to walk off again. Same thing. Death withdrawals. Back to 2mg.

Side context on me. I work out 6 days a week. I go to church every week and read the Bible almost every day. My tv isn’t turned on until absolutely everything in my day has been accomplished. I’m very disciplined. Other than my 6 year stint popping pills of course. But I was resolute. I wanted off suboxone. I didn’t like the way I felt so tired on it. It messed with my dick horribly. I just wanted to be done with it all.

Back to my story. Fluctuated between 2mg and 1mg of suboxone. At 1mg I often hit withdrawal and had to take some more. So 2mg was really the lowest I could get to comfortably. And walking off from 2mg is basically impossible with the 36 hour half life of suboxone. Wait. 36 hours??? Why didn’t anyone explain this to me?!?!

So how did I walk off of suboxone after just admitting it’s basically impossible? Pretty easily actually. Here’s what worked for me:

Day 1- 100mg Sublocade shot; the constant flow eliminated highs and lows. My dick was worse than ever. And I was very sleepy. No withdrawals for 30 days though

Day 30- crazy hot sweats withdrawal, but no flu. Took 2 of those kratom gummies I used to take 10 of to get a mini high. Completely eliminated my withdrawals

Day 31 to 52- took 2 kratom gummies every day while the leftovers of the Sublocade shot slowly subsided. Used my slowly improving dick as my guide for when I thought I could try using no kratom and not having withdrawals

Day 53- I was very sexually charged and for the first time sex felt like it did before starting suboxone

Day 53 to 60- no withdrawals or kratom

And that brings us to today. I appear to have officially beaten suboxone. Praise God. I’m not sure if I could have used kratom alongside ever diminishing doses of fragments of suboxone pills, but I doubt it. It was INCREDIBLY hard to find someone willing to give me Sublocade. It was a crazy insurance nightmare, and I had to go to a Russian family practice to get it. I live in a big suburb in a major US city. So why was it so hard? My guess is that these doctors are sold on the “gold standard” of suboxone and that many of their patients are shooting fentanyl. Getting off recovery medicine isn’t exactly top of mind. But for those who are more in my situation, I would highly recommend looking into Sublocade followed by Kratom if you want to eventually stop using suboxone.

Good luck and God bless. Hope this helps someone!

 

[AlexPK]

Update in case anyone has read this and is wondering if it still holds.

Short answer is yes. The only update I have to it is that I started feeling some uncharacteristic blues and took another small 2 gummy dose of kratom.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on something. Not sure if it’s just mental or a combination of mental and physiological. I have zero qualms about being on a low dose (meaning I get no euphoria from it) of kratom every couple days for a bit while my body continues to adjust if that’s what it takes.

Most importantly though, bupe withdrawals appear to still be completely gone. Pretty sure it’s going to stay that way as it’s been well over a month since I first started to feel the post Sublocade withdrawals.

Fingers crossed…

 

[DeathIndustrial88]

Good job!


I've been on bupe for 10 years now. It feels like a trap at this point. If I try to go without it, I feel sore, achey, depressed, sweaty, just really low over all mood & feeling.
But if I take it, i'll feel semi-normal for an hour or two & then I'm just exhausted & falling asleep the rest of the day. So I'm damned if I do & damned if I don't. And at this point I can't figure out if I wanna stay on it or not. I'd like to stay on an opioid, but bupe just makes me feel like shit.

 

[AlexPK]

Good job!


I've been on bupe for 10 years now. It feels like a trap at this point. If I try to go without it, I feel sore, achey, depressed, sweaty, just really low over all mood & feeling.
But if I take it, i'll feel semi-normal for an hour or two & then I'm just exhausted & falling asleep the rest of the day. So I'm damned if I do & damned if I don't. And at this point I can't figure out if I wanna stay on it or not. I'd like to stay on an opioid, but bupe just makes me feel like shit.

I totally understand where you’re at. The frustration is maddening. I know I was on it for less than a year vs your 10 years, but I think process is still the same.

Do you want to still be on addiction medicine to stop you from going back to harder stuff? If that’s the case, you could explore the Sublocade shot and just stay on it instead of the daily bupe. Even though I was somewhat sleepy on the Sublocade shot, the lack of highs and lows on the bupe levels throughout the month may be something you like.

And if you think you’re mentally ready to be done with drugs in general, the Sublocade shot followed by a month of Kratom could help you avoid the nasty (almost identical) withdrawals like it did for me. Who knows? Either way, prayers for you on your journey. Happy to answer any questions you may have about my journey.

 

[DeathIndustrial88]

I totally understand where you’re at. The frustration is maddening. I know I was on it for less than a year vs your 10 years, but I think process is still the same.

Do you want to still be on addiction medicine to stop you from going back to harder stuff? If that’s the case, you could explore the Sublocade shot and just stay on it instead of the daily bupe. Even though I was somewhat sleepy on the Sublocade shot, the lack of highs and lows on the bupe levels throughout the month may be something you like.

And if you think you’re mentally ready to be done with drugs in general, the Sublocade shot followed by a month of Kratom could help you avoid the nasty (almost identical) withdrawals like it did for me. Who knows? Either way, prayers for you on your journey. Happy to answer any questions you may have about my journey.

Honestly the only thing stopping me from doing harder stuff these days is how "hard" it's become to find. lol They should refer to heroin as a "hard-to-find drug" at this point. lol

At least for me. I had a heroin hookup in a small town in the midwest, but now I live in a city & nobody knows anything about heroin or opioids. And in the rare cases I do run into somebody with pain pills, they want insane prices for something I know is barely gonna last me a few days.

I actually prefer some of the highs & lows, cause when the "highs" (if you can call them that) do hit me on Subs, it helps me function better through out my day. I'll have more energy & be able to get stuff done. However once you've been on bupe long enough, you get stuck without any of thee highs or lows really anyway.

My situation is probably complex. I think I'm always gonna need an opioid to feel "normal" and if I didn't, I'd be guzzling pounds of poppyseed or loperamide just for some kind of effect.
So I'd rather be able to switch to a full agonist or opioid of my choice to be perfectly honest.

But it's still always interesting to see other people come off of it & how their experience goes. I think in your case is that you wanted to stop, so you did. And for me, I'd just like to be on something better so that my quality of life feels better.

I've been through some sub withdrawals back in the day. I think the longest I went was a week. And I tried using kratom that week to no avail. Felt nothing from the kratom. I did feel a rush of feelings & things come back to me that I hadn't felt in awhile due to the subs, but the insomnia & body achey was pretty bad. And that was only from a few weeks of using subs at the time, so I couldn't imagine years now.

It takes a lot of work to set your mind to something though & accomplish it! So congratulations!
I'm not surprised bupe seemed impossible at first. No one told you about the 36hr half-life? Honestly, I'd say having a heavy bupe dependency is probably worse than taking hydro/oxy as prescribed or even abusing them a little bit. Cause bupe might only be a partial agonist, but it's potent as hell. They should be warning people about what they might be doing (basically trading one habit for one that could be heavier).

 

[AlexPK]

Honestly the only thing stopping me from doing harder stuff these days is how "hard" it's become to find. lol They should refer to heroin as a "hard-to-find drug" at this point. lol

At least for me. I had a heroin hookup in a small town in the midwest, but now I live in a city & nobody knows anything about heroin or opioids. And in the rare cases I do run into somebody with pain pills, they want insane prices for something I know is barely gonna last me a few days.

I actually prefer some of the highs & lows, cause when the "highs" (if you can call them that) do hit me on Subs, it helps me function better through out my day. I'll have more energy & be able to get stuff done. However once you've been on bupe long enough, you get stuck without any of thee highs or lows really anyway.

My situation is probably complex. I think I'm always gonna need an opioid to feel "normal" and if I didn't, I'd be guzzling pounds of poppyseed or loperamide just for some kind of effect.
So I'd rather be able to switch to a full agonist or opioid of my choice to be perfectly honest.

But it's still always interesting to see other people come off of it & how their experience goes. I think in your case is that you wanted to stop, so you did. And for me, I'd just like to be on something better so that my quality of life feels better.

I've been through some sub withdrawals back in the day. I think the longest I went was a week. And I tried using kratom that week to no avail. Felt nothing from the kratom. I did feel a rush of feelings & things come back to me that I hadn't felt in awhile due to the subs, but the insomnia & body achey was pretty bad. And that was only from a few weeks of using subs at the time, so I couldn't imagine years now.

It takes a lot of work to set your mind to something though & accomplish it! So congratulations!
I'm not surprised bupe seemed impossible at first. No one told you about the 36hr half-life? Honestly, I'd say having a heavy bupe dependency is probably worse than taking hydro/oxy as prescribed or even abusing them a little bit. Cause bupe might only be a partial agonist, but it's potent as hell. They should be warning people about what they might be doing (basically trading one habit for one that could be heavier).

I feel you. And makes perfect sense. When I stopped popping pills in the first place, I was in a very addictive mindset. But after dealing with the bupe withdrawals and everything trying to stop, I told my wife I’d rather be back on hydros than stuck on bupe.

Yeah, I was really ignorant and just trusted some very well intentioned friends about suboxone. I saw someone on one of these forums say that getting on bupe for a kratom habit was “swatting a fly with a bazooka.” I couldn’t agree more.

The one plus of my experience on bupe is that I’m pretty turned off from drugs right now. Silver lining if there’s any, right? But my plan is to take small amounts of kratom if I need to and not return to the large amounts I was taking when I was using it as a substitute to the high I’d get from pills and booze.

Appreciate your thoughts and response. Hope you find something that works well for you soon.

 

[AlexPK]

Update a week later. The PAWS is real. Man, bupe is no joke. Even though I’ve made it past the withdrawal phase that was such a beast, I’m not fully out of the woods yet.

So I’m back to taking the non-euphoric dose of kratom with relative success. Still have some uncharacteristic blues, but the kratom eliminates most of that. I am seeing my mind wander toward the hydros again knowing that they’d instantly relieve my PAWS, but I’ve come so far that I know I don’t REALLY want to do that.

So I’ll continue taking my low dose of kratom for longer than I thought, but trying to stay positive in knowing how far I’ve come. And especially that I threw out all my bupe a week ago.