Switching from 160mg of Methadone to Bupe straight away?

[Freek12]

Hi All, i have read this bupe thread until page 6 and i think i found what i was looking for and that is that i am convinced that bupe is effective at preventing withdrawal from much higher doses of methadone then the 30 mg they recommend at the time to make the switch.

I read in this thread about somebody with 270 mg methadone who's bupe doc confirmed that such a high methadone dose could be replaced by bupe, but i am at 160 mg methadone for a very long time alreadly like more then 2 decades with the last 12 years on 160 mg a day and still every morning i am not sick as a dog, but a little sickish if that is a word in English so if or even when bupe could work for me i think i would love it to feel alright for a few days instead of every morning bla bla.
There are certain complications for me being that i use quite a few substances like seroquel and lyrica in respectively 300 and 600 mg once daily while these two meds basically require twice daily dosing having only a 6 hour halflifetime both so the first thing for me to figure out is what substance causes me to feel ehh lets call it unpleasant the word withdrawal would be too much.

Aside from the seroquel and lyrica i also have a sized benzo habit, but since i potentiate my benzo using lyrica, and still take a lot of benzo like the equivalent of 100 mg diazepam, i truly have no idea anymore in what universe my benzo tolerance may be at the time i can this this much and that is that without lyrica i dont feel 5 mg xanax while with lyrica 3 mg is plenty.
The xanax is gone luckily as i was busy to create an unbelievable benzo habit after finding a nearly unlimited alprazolam source and worse is that this nice elderly lady sells me them for a fee like 400 0.5 mg ones for 50 euros so that equals 100 of those bars like you call them in the US. Atleast i could buy all the long acting benzo she also had, but for 400 ten mg tranxenes the price was the same so at the time 150 mg tranxene with lyrica else badness would be mine oh yeah i almost forget the oxazepam a weak benzo short acting, but in spite of being as weak as say librium oxazepam can deliver a little buzz.

Anyway that are my substances, but with all that in my system potentiating my methadone i have a higher then 160 mg methadone tolerance like 250 mg i think.

Based on what i read in this thread and if we forget for a moment all the other substances then can 160 mg methadone be replaced by bupe straight away?
Better ofcourse would be to lower the dose to say 100 mg a day, but i really suck with tapering and i wont ask my clinic, because every mg i lower i will never get back so yeah back until 120 mg no problem, but going lower fast and especially going below those 120 mg could be a goal then so that if bupe can work having a 120 mg methadone tolerance then i will try it, because i get sick and tired from the methadone, sure when i take it i feel the unpleasant feeling subside, but i cant go anywhere like outside the country if i dont ask a month upfront so subutex or subuxone getting this er week would be greatf it can work for me.

I am very interested in starting bupe provided this is possible and i get the idea it is possible from 160 mg methadone if not for the rest of things in my case so i am extremely curious about people's experiences who made the switch from methadone to bupe coming from much higher methadone doses then those 30 recommended mg's.

Bupe is incredibly potent its easily 40-50 times the potency of morphine on a mg to mg base depending on the ROA so lets calculate a little and start with a 4 mg buprenorphine dose so if this amount would indeed be 50 times stronger then morphine then this might equal about 200 mg morphine per IV whereas would i want to replace my methadone with another straight agonist like morphine then i estimate that 600-1200 oral mg's would be needed to feel normal certainly no buzz.
I know somebody who takes methadone as long roughly as i do and she is already for years on 120 mg methadone well some time ago she managed to find a number of those 200 mg morphine pills so i told her to start low and take more if desired so she started with 800 mg and two hours later nothing so she dropped another 800 mg and this time she got a little sleepy then at the end she took 2.2 grams of morphine she didn't need to take her methadone, but that and sleepiness were the 'best' she felt behind using more then 2 grams of morphine.

The last time i tried a straight agonist otherwise then methadone was oxycontin years ago and i read about it that you can chew them etcetera, but one day i managed to get 140 fourty mg oxycontins so i thought i hit the jackpot well i didn't and i really dont mind it when the following is not believed i have no reason to lie though and its not 'cool' to have an absurd tolerance, but i dropped 40 pills being 1,600 mg oxycodone and felt nothing at all while i was at 120 mg methadone at the time so its obvious how strong methadone can block other straight agonists. If i would have bin sick and would have taken the named amount at that point then without a doubt i would have overdosed, but taking the oxy on top of my normal dose was useless.

I used to think 'more is better' like others among us here so i was extremely amazed to feel zip from methadone and the oxy. The previous owners of the oxycontin had no idea what they were having and sold me 140 pills for 50 cents per 40 mg pill.
Shit i am always so longwinded and that makes that people skip my replies, but i dont post much only when i do i remember so many related matters and write them down so i will shut up now and put some space between my lines.
Excuse me for talking too much i hope for a reply anyway.
Best regards, Freek. ps my name 'freek' is my real name not a handle

 

[Tommyboy]

I don't have experience with this, but one complication that you have to take into consideration is the amount of time that you will have to wait after your last dose of methadone before initiating the suboxone or subutex. Taking the sub too soon after the methadone will cause precipitated withdrawals, so taking into consideration the long half-life of methadone and the dose you are on you would have to go several days without the methadone before starting the sub.

What some people do is actually switch to a shorter acting opiate in the interim, thus allowing their body to eliminate the methadone so that they will only have to go a day without an opioid when they are ready to start the sub.

Since your question is a little different than the thread you posted in I'm going to move it into its own thread (and create a basic title that is fitting), although it might be merged with another suboxone/subutex thread in the future.

 

[Freek12]

Hi Tommyboy, thank you for giving my reply a better spot and changed it into a posting this will likely help in getting hopefully an amount of replies i can do something with, but yes you are right about the likely to be long wait before i could take the first dose of bupe only i will prevent precipitates so i wait until i am sick as a dog while i will take my other substances so that then i will be the withdrawal from methadone and not from something else.

I would had liked to make my request a posting instead of a reply, but since i am still relatively new here i had no idea if it would be allowed to start a posting and where exactly so this solution is fine.

Once more you are quite right by stating to use a short acting opiate to get rid of the methadone, but there are no other opiates to get not for sale, not legal just not at all, except if you are a painpatient and lucky enough to get a dose of opiate who does help the pains properly, because they gave my mother a 25 mic/hour fent patch and still she has this nerve pain 7 out of 10 and that is scandalous.

Nerve pain barely reacts on the usual opiates, but methadone has an action against nervepains only methadone here is also 'that stuff they give to junkies' instead of using it for it's pain suppressing qualities. It happens though and personally i send a few people into a methadone clinic with severe arthritis pains so this guy i still see now and then and he does great on twice daily 5 mg.

I have enough lyrica and that stuff is also used to treat nervepains, but the capsules i get are 300 mg each and i would like to try lyrica on my mother only no way i would give her 300 mg i think for startes 75 mg woud be fine and if it works the doc will write for it. When i use words as 'like to try on my mother' then this sounds like i am experimenting with drugs using my mother as guineapig, which is obviously not the case, but the fact is that i know that her pain can be brought back to 1-2 out of ten instead of 7 out of 10 and that was while under full influence from her current 25 mcg patcghes. I want my mother to be as good as painfree and if needed i go with her when she has a talk with a doctor.

Always so longwinded i always try to be short when i start writing to end up with a lot of text when i hit send, but as well as i like it to read long postings if they are interesting enough there must be more people who like long postings provided such postings are interesting enough.

I was trying to say that there is no chance for me to get short acting opiates, except for worthless, but plain and simple instant release morphine you wont see it there where people have it nor will they mention the word 'morphine' too fast
Methadone acts long yeah i remember when i received the 160 mg somewhere in the first month that i forgot to dose on a saturday like usual with my take home bottle so you would think i must have bin sick going a day without methadone, but i didn't feel anything bad so back then my dose easily held me 2 days now its more like 15-25 hours.
I once tried at 120 mg methadone only to fill in my methadone habit by smoking heroin they sell here, but after i put a gram in my poor lungs i still felt crappy so injecting then would be the next step, but not way that i want to start shooting i simply want my tolerance down without becoming a heroin addict in the proces.
I could smoke grams literally, and did so, but no effect so i am not going to try this again what i will do though is feeling a little envies towards people in Austri(not Oz) where they give mscontin to addicts and who knows what more, but okay i am not gong to make this the size of a newspaper so i better shut op here.

One last matter about lyrica this stuff can cause a buzz by itself, but 2 days later and its over with getting a buzz to my luck though lyrica didn't stop potentiating certain things

 

[tricomb]

You would have to go a SUPER LONG TIME into SEVERE withdrawals off that high a dose from methadone --> buprenorphine.

It's often easier, although I'm not saying it's safer, to switch temporarily to a more forgiving, shorter acting full agonist such as methadone --> morphine/oxycodone/ or hydromorphone --> buprenorphine, I know this from experience.

 

[Mr.Scagnattie]

Yeah the amount of time you'd have to wait and suffer before being able to safely take the bupe without PW's would be a loonnng time and totally miserable. This is why people taper down to 30mg's before getting on bupe.

Also, if you need that much methadone to keep you well, no amount of bupe is going to be enough for you as the ceiling dose is 32mg's which is equal to about 30mg's of methadone.

 

[Sumtin81]

I'm sorry I didn't read the whole post but I think I got the jist of it. I went on 28mgs of subs from being on 60mg of methadone for about 2 years. Just after 2 days of being off the methadone. My sub doctor thought that was enough. I thought I was feeling withdraws. Ha! I obvouisly wasn't because I got the worst withdraws I ever felt. For about 3-4 days.
Methadone is like sticky gum. It sticks and holds on to your receptors for along time. If I had to do it over agian (Thank God I don't) I'd wait a week (or longer) like most people would say. Some things you read at forums you have to take with a grain of salt. But most people do agree on that. To bad my Doctor didnt.
Give it enough time before you go on subs and they'll work great. Just make you wait till you can't wait anymore. Make sure your feeling physical withdraws and not just mental.

 

[Z Y G G Y]

Wouldn't risk it. Precipitated w/d is really horrible and there is nothing you can do about it. It's like w/d x10. I'd never feel safe taking bupe after methadone unless like 2 weeks have passed.

If you want to do it I suggest:
lower your dose of methadone as much as you can
start taking morphine along with benzos
after 2 weeks, wait 24hrs and take bupe in small increments

 

[Freek12]

Thank you very much for all your replies, but i believe the general tone i see about my wish to switch to bupe coming from 160 mg methadone that this is basically not possible so yeah going down with the methadone would be the proper step to take its just that in the bupe thread i did read about higher dosed people on methadone then 30 mg's who made this switch successfully.

Precipitated withdrawals scare the shit out of me so no way i would put myself in such a bad state of being, but suppose i wait with taking methadone until i am fully in withdrawal so that may involve that i have to go 4-5 days without methadone and when it comes to withdrawals i am rather wuss like so i can do this no idea whereas short acting opiate use i would really give a lot for that option it simply will not happen as no doctor would be willing to write for that much morphine to cover for 160 mg methadone.

The lowest i think i can get my methadone dose might be around 70-80 mg i have no real idea in fact, because i never had to go without also i never tapered, except for one lame attempt end 90ties coming from for me only 60 mg methadone still by the time i was down to 20 mg without feeling better and i started the then max allowed 60 mg again until a week later it became allowed to get more then 60 mg and with my 'more is better' idea i went straight away to 120 mg's and when 200 mg became allowed that became my dose, stupid enough right.

2 days off methadone is way too short so yeah i believe you instantly when you felt miserable no matter those 28 mg bupe being way too high, but i do think that if you would have waited until you was physically sick as fuck and then would have started bupe and a switch from 60 mg methadone should be possible i cant believe 30 mg methadone is highest to make a successfull switch to bupe.

28 mg bupe only equals 30 mg methadone well i dont agree at all with that thought the problem was too less time in between the transition and not the 60 mg methadone you was on as 2 days are nothing with methadone as it is very liphophilic and sits everywhere in your body, but not into the bones like i hear now and then. Sure it can feel like that when you come down, but bones are bones and not fatty tissues.
20 mg bupe you put under your tongue of which roughly 10 mg makes it into your system so that amount equals about 400 mg IV morphine, which is plenty to cover for 60 mg methadone provided you wait long enough in between.

I do have one option left i could use to get rid of the methadone dose and that would be trying to get into a free heroin program in my country, but it sucks that i am more known as a methadone abuser then heroin user even while i am stable at 160 mg's that stigma will be mine forever and problems in free heroin programs are that you have to show minimally twice daily or else tree times a day if you can get the max 1,000 mg diamorphine only this program is in another town what the fuck should i do there the whole day so that is a problem i will find something on this though.
You are not allowed to nod i understood from somebody who knew now isn't that a little absurd that if you nod that they will lower the diamorphine dose i think it is so the majority of heroin smokers cant nod while the few shooters inject and nod elsewhere, but even then no chance i want to beome an injector. So far else i produce another paper sized story.

 

[Phat5o]

Wouldn't risk it. Precipitated w/d is really horrible and there is nothing you can do about it. It's like w/d x10. I'd never feel safe taking bupe after methadone unless like 2 weeks have passed.

If you want to do it I suggest:
lower your dose of methadone as much as you can
start taking morphine along with benzos
after 2 weeks, wait 24hrs and take bupe in small increments

i just wanted to say i totally agree with this post

i would give a minimum of 2 weeks on a short acting opioid before making the switch. that in itself can be a slippery slope for an addict. to be honest if i was on 160mg methadone i would probably stay on a short acting opioid for 4 - 8 weeks before switching to bupe.

 

[Sumtin81]

Yep. That's what I got for listening to my sub doc. I now do my research online then I take my what the docs say with a grain of salt. Not always but I definitly do some research 1st. Good luck tho.

 

[Freek12]

Thanks again for the later replies i am sorry i didn't say something sooner, but i was in the miserable process of seeing my relationship go to hell so the shit i take became evenmore important and switiching to bupe i better forget about this until i am at the least down to 80 mg this amount can make a switch possible, however i have nothing to back this thought up with, but bupe and methadone both are extremely potent opioids with the difference that methadone has no ceiling so it happened that some people required 1,000 mg methadone a day and functioned normally.

The 32 mg being the ceiling for bupe, but for the fact that bupe is a partial agonist makes me wonder when the partial agonism will start to play a role so what is the deal with bupe does it barely work anymore at 32 mg for being a partial agonist or do those 32 mg's act 32 times stronger then 1 mg of bupe? Not really right so the higher you go with bupe the more importantant the partial agonism becomes, but you know this makes me think that 16 mg bupe would do better then 32 mg and 8 mg bupe may do better then 16 mg so what do the experts say is there any truth in those statements?

One thing i do know for sure and that is that more isn't better with bupe while with methadone more is better in the sense of a stronger effect 'how better' that is i cannot determine, but it seems that with methadone receptor occupation is complete already with doses between 60 and 80 mg roughly and even when this is not true then opiate receptors will down regulate with methadone while this will happen a lot less with short acting opiates, because on methadone opiate receptors are basically flooded with opiate while using gear or short acting morphine causes opiate bloodlevels to get higher and lower so sickness and getting high happens, i think.
A few years ago somebody who called herself an expert when it comes to methadone knowledge once mentioned an experiment done using methadone to mark the methadone molecules with a radio active substance so that higher concentrations here or there can be seen, but they did a CAT scan and the word was that methadone leaves 22-32% of available receptors unoccupied well at first i was amazed and willing to believe it until i thought some more so why would methadone not occupie all avaliable receptors instead of leaving that percentage unoccupied with the reasoning that endorphines will be produced again only its plain nonsense and so i explained my view in some forum i used to attend, the truth seemed to hurt a little bit

I am thinking about a plan to do whatever possible to get short acting opiates so what i have in mind is to go see my house doctor first and to ask that is my clinic agrees with it if she is willing to write short acting opiates for me with the goal of getting rid of so much methadone dependency, i mean i dont have to be high, which i could be if i would get into a free dope program an option i will use in case the doc tells me to take a hike with my request.
When i tell my clinic i want into the free dope program and that the process to get in has to be started, but to hell with 1 gram of free diamorphine if maybe very maybe i can get 1 gram of morphine a day this amount might just yet hold me, because 1,000 mg oral morphine means that about 350 mg makes it into yuor system and however better then nothing its a meagre amount to have to cover for 160 mg methadone and then to think that the methadone we get is called a racemic mix this means that the methadone we get exists out of inactive dextro methadone and active levo methadone so from any given dose of methadone only half is able to act and still its extremely potent.
The dextro methadone is the one responsible for NMDA antagonism this keeps tolerance at bay, but also dextro methadone can cause this heart problem called Torsade des Pointes these are heart rhythm disturbances who can be deadly if left untreated so 40 years after they started to hand out methadone they all of a sudden want to reduce especially women to no more then 100 mg a day so what a load of crap when some women i know already get methadone for 3 decades and all of a sudden have to lower their dose who held them well without using dope anymore.

Still the risk for TdP is real, but they should have thought about that years sooner also in my lengthy addiction experience never somebody died from TdP i have to add though that only since medio 2000 methadone doses who could be had went up from 60 to 120mg with me being the first one on this dose on a surprising way, because a clinic employee saw me dropping bottles of methadone i bought just before and she arranged the 120 mg for me, which was extremely kind for in fact i should had bin kicked out for using more methadone then prescribed.

For me minimally wanting to reduce my methadone is that if i ever need proper painkilling then too much methadone will prevent exactly that like i found out in 2005 after a bad accident ruining my knee and it was quite painful so when i complained i was given morphine in the unbelievable dose of 20 mg IM and they even said that they made an exception as most people get 10 mg so aftyer i named a range of effective painkillers of whom 90% was unknown i decided to start my own pain suppression by using more methadone and important not to take it in one go, but 2 to 6 times a day if needed as for addiction once daily is enough with methadone provided your dose is high enough then for pain control multiple smaller doses will do the job.
I added 3 times a day 60 mg methadone on top of i believe 140 mg and i had no pain, but imagine that i get an accident and its unknown i need methadone then what kind of nightmare could happen following that so i dont think that i will ever be helped with 10 mg morphine IM equalling 30 mg morphine per oral so that is my goal and the ways i will try to take the methadone go.

Well to make things a bit more interesting my clinic had a new methadone doctor a very knowledgeable woman out of Belgium the country next to mine and she had no problems to jack my dose up to 200 mg's then i dont know what happened anymore, but i reduced to 90 mg then when i wanted back to those 200 mg i got a no with a new doctor still also this doc had no problems to up my dose in one go to 160 mg, but there it stopped.
When bupe was already used in the US for many years it was here unknown until about a decade ago well and addicts in low methadone doses who kept using obviously didn't want bupe as with bupe another opiate wont act anymore as bupe has an even stronger affinity to it's receptors then naloxone so subuxone is complete nonsense with naloxone inthere it made this stuff needlessly expensive in the US while the naloxone in subuxone is inactive so if you can get subutex generic or non generic then this will work equally as well as the same dose in subuxone.

I saw people injecting subuxone and they got high, but i also remember how a guy with a methadone dependency dropped 2 mg's of bupe and within minutes he got sicker and sicker until he was in such a bad state that he puked shitted and such without the possibility of taking opiate to feel better what he did do eventually was asking another guy to shoot him up with a decent amount of secobarbital and he slept for two days by which time his methadone worked again so yeah what happene4d to that guy was that he gave himself very bad precipital withdrawals.
2 weeks to stay on a short acting opiate is way too short, but if i can pull if of that i get short acting morphine prescribed in a time release version then i get enough time to allow the methadone to leave me, which takes a few months i bet.
Well another lengthy reply i dont seem to learn to leave it to a few lines when i have some more to share with all of you so thanks for just reading my posting and if somebody feels like replying that would be truly great.