Hello,
I saw your other posts on this topic and want to clarify some things. So your purpose here would be to lower your tolerance to kratom (to what level?) or get rid
of kratom habit? Yes i agree with you there's so many options and it gets confusing, altough if you could kindly provide more details i will try to answer your every question regarding memantine here or on pm if you like.
Thinking about it wheter its lowering your tolerance or stopping, imho the most straightforward way would be to supplement your kratom intake entirely
with memantine (in the range of 60mg to max 100 mg daily), given your experience with ketamine. The doses are quite high (though im basing them on my experience and a science journal, that was giving patients 60 mg as a starting dose). Normally you should probably err on the side of caution, but i personally found doses in the range of 20-40 mg a bit lackluster both in detoxing and as add on to try take lower doses of my opioids. The method i'm suggesting should allow you to stop kratom and suffer no or almost no withdrawal symptoms and cravings. Take the 60-100 mg range for a week (you can dose daily or every other day, but given your prior experience with ketamine it should be fine daily. Then after a week you can lower your dose to 20-40mg (maybe even lower, more as a maintence dose). You mentioned that you take a lot of other things apart from kratom, if you're dependent on them leave them be, You could try this for 1 to 3 weeks ( though like i said before i wouldnt take high doses after a week, unless you want to take 1 large dose and then wait 3-4 days and repeat). As memantine stays a long time in your organism, in my experience it should affect you up to a month. It could potentially resolve your withdrawals and cravings, help with depression and paws. Then free of the need to take kratom you could take decide what to do. I personally find a very helpful drug altough remember it is no a silver bullet for tolerance/dependance and eventualyy for me craving and depression returned (but memantine allowed me to be drug free for the first time for a long time first for 3 months and then a little over 6 months)
In some other thread you asked about potential drawbacks/side effects. Off the top of my head:
1.The obvious one is difficulty falling asleep, esp if you're dosing daily or even every other day. I found myself staying awake for 18-20 hours, if i didn't force myself to bed, set reminders on my phone etc. and often i would get up after 4-5 hours. Some tips that you could mitigate it is if you're drinking coffee: limit it to one after you wake up and take your memantine as early as possible (imho there should be at least 12-14 hours between your dose and the time you go normally to sleep), Set yourself reminders on the phone to get off it at least an hour before bed, take a hot shower and stuff that they recommend ppl. As you are taking gabapentin, lunesta and valium they can be very helpful or even necessary. I would personally use individually use pregabalin, carisoprodol (which was the best) , valium and some anthistamine i can'y remember. Often in combinations because the insomnia was so strong. Sorry don't want to scare you but you really should be prepared, if you can't sleep on it. It's hard to say how you would react. For me in terms of higher doses i needed drugs to sleep, altough sometimes i would fall asleep witouth them but i can't stress enough that you should take it as early as possible, dont drink coffee, limit nicotine and do the other things i mentioned. Of course i forgot to mention that you should be wary with the sleeping drugs not get addicted to them. In the 20-40 mg range i found sleeping without aids easiear, altough this drugs makes you forget you're tired and you can find yourself doing things very late up into the night
2. Potential Heart Problems. I used memantine to detox 3 times, With the first to i didn't notice this problem but in my third attempt after dosing 60-120 for a week,
exactly at the 7th day i found myself with chest pains, tightness in chest and feeling generally unwell, being unable to do much. it lasted for a whole 24 hours. I decided to stop memantine for a week, was unwell for at least 2 more days. Recoverd after 5 days and after a week i reinstated memantine in the range of 20-60 mg and didn;t have this problem. It mightve been memantine or sth else. Im writing this cause you can find this info about memantine causing potential heart problems in a memantine subreddit (i don't have time to search for it, but later i will try to find it). Generally wheter its true or not i feel like it's something worth considering and if you plan on doing memantine doing everything in your power to takecare of your body.
3. You should be fine as you are familiar with ketamine but (despite being a really clean disso) at least at first general loopiness, potential brain fog,
processing slower and talking slower (altough seeing more even if you can't express it very well). When i tried it for the first for withdrawal and went shopping
i literally forgot what should i do in a shop ( i knew what i wanted and that i came here to do shopping) but i just stood in front of a closed in fridge and literally forgot what you should do (my identity was very fragmented), was overwhelmed by all the lights, all the product names , the noises. I probably stood there like max 2 min but to me it felt like i spent there an hour. Next time i came prepared with a written list and headphones with music and it went much better.
I just really recommend you to read the psychonaut wiki entry on memantine and read about potential effects to know what might happen.
i
4. After a while tolerance rises, everything becomes flat, it sorta loses it magic. You feel numb emotionally. It can be a blessing ot a big nuisance. Sry it's really late in my corner of the world so can't really go into much detail. Will try to write something late
to quickly sum it up while i like memantine and i find a good tool: i sucesfully detoxed 3 times from tramadol 1000+mg daily doses, oxy up to 200 mg daily and third time once again tramadol 1000mg+ and Pregabalin. My routine was always the same i would start with a 60 mg - rise it to 80 mg the second day. The third day was 100 mg. From there it would depend either i stayed for another day or two on 100 mg or drop to 80 on the 4th day , stay on 80 for the 5th day. 6-8 day was 60 mg and from there i would drop to 40mg stay on it anywhere where from a week to two weeks and then sometimes drop to 20mg for a a couple days to a week or just go from 40 mg to 0.
This way it killed my withdrawal completely, made me functional (if you get accustomed to its effects noone would notice), gave my a pause, a breather. Allowing me to gain some insight into my addiction and some aspects of my behavioral problems. I could write more but will stop for now. Just wanted to say that i find it helpful in opiate withdra wal , pregabalin withdrawal and it killed my cravings for nicotine. The only substance i find it not helpful for is benzo dependance (but it is probably better than nothing). To sum it for me the only downside is possible insomnia and if u haven't had dissociatives before you can get at least a week of mind fog etc untill your brain gets accustomed. So it's better to prepare in terms of shopping, making lists, setting reminders on the phone etc.
Regarding lowering opiate tolerance with memantine i tried it and found it very lacking and lackluster ( i was trying doses 20-40 mg). In terms of immediate effects i didn't notice any effect on lowering my tolerance. In some days i even took much more because i didn't find my doses satisfying. Tried it for a week/2 weeks and abandonded it. My theory is that at least in terms of smaller doses betwen 20-40 mg, maybe you need a longer build up in your body. Personally im curious how much smaller doses like 5 mg would work for tolerance.
@pnillyg in some other topic you mentioned maybe taking one higher dose and imho i have a feeling that would work much better than adding memantine daily to your stack. Its a bit speculation (based on my exp) but you wont feel wd symptoms as strongly and dysphoria, your cravings should be very weak or non existent and you could probably lower your doses very quickly. When i was wd from oxy or tramadol and you offered me some or i had some i wouldnt be interested in taking my normal dose. There's something with the higher doses that just saturate you (later i will try to upload a paper that somehow backs this, where morphine addicts given 60 mg memantine in their first day of wd, it attenued their wd and they werent as interested in taking the drug as much and some other things i cant remember but i have to mention the effect was transient). Also i feel that with higher doses the effect of not needing your doc would be extended at least to th next day. If not you could bump yourself up with a 20mg for eg the day after the higher dose.
Sorry for the rambling and mistakes. I shouldnt post very late at night, Hope this helps somebody a little, esp you pnillyg. If you have patience hit me up here or on pm, i will try and answer any question you might have regarding memantine. Unfortunately i dont know anything about uldn, but it seems very very promising regarding tolerance reversal.
