you wont find out what clean is all about on bupe or sub, thats for sure..do you honestly want to find out what clean life is like?if so, just get off the medications and other stuff..sobriety is a whole new world trust me, good and bad ...
Bupe is bupe/sub actual sobriety or just a substitute!?
- Thread starter Jabberwocky
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you wont find out what clean is all about on bupe or sub, thats for sure..do you honestly want to find out what clean life is like?if so, just get off the medications and other stuff..sobriety is a whole new world trust me, good and bad ...
Mad Dash
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It is wonderful that you found a way to make it stick, God bless you for doing so. But for some people it is not an option. For me bupe was a choice against other more powerful opiates. After 2 deployments and an airborne operation that nearly made me a paraplegic I am in a world of hurt. The entire right side of my body, and the full length of my spine are at 7/10 every morning I wake up. And along with that I have a slew of nasty psychological problems that came as baggage from my time overseas and then made worse by getting out on a medical discharge.
They put me on your typical hospital opiates (morphine drip) with oxycodone for breakthrough pain. Then when I was released more oxycodone than I knew what to do with as well as soma and xanax. I joined the military to get away from my struggles with drug use and there I was right back in it. As soon as I signed my DD-214 I went to a partial hospitalization program to get me off the drugs, they put me on suboxone strips for the few months I was there and I was always in pain, and always ill.
It was not until much later That we realized I was hypersensitive to naloxone. But even when I got off of the subs completely my life was a crippling ball of nightmares. I could hardly walk, I could not exercise and I could not hold a job due to the pain. I went to PM doctor 3 months later telling him my situation that I did not want to go back to regular opiates but suboxone did not work for me, it just made me feel like I was always in WD. I went to this doctor because I was about to relapse due to the pain alone. He said that it should be an easy fix and wrote me Subutex instead. When I filled the RX it changed my life. Manageable pain (still 7/10 when I wake up until I take my meds) but I didn't feel high.
Naloxone is filth and should never have been added to this medication. As a chronic pain patient, with PTSD bupe is a miracle. It keeps my pain stable most of the time, for breakthrough pain I take zanaflex, just a muscle relaxer but it helps immensely. It also helps as an antidepressant. I am also on Viibryd and they seem to work wonderfully together. My psychiatrist still has me on Valium, but I want to get off. I was at 20 mg/day. I am now down to 7.5mg/day. I hope to be off it completely very soon. He is giving me a bottle of 1 mg Ativan for my panic attacks once I am off the Valium for use as needed when I have no more Valium, because my panic attacks are not just a danger to myself, they are a danger to others, I get real life flashbacks during the day that have set me off inside a grocery store.
All of that was to say, some of us don't get a choice. If I did not have bupe, I would have killed myself a long time ago. It allows me to be control my pain without building tolerance, without craving more, without clouding my mind or judgement, and it is in steady supply for me. I realize what it is like to be completely sober, however, it is no longer an option for me. And the same goes for other people. Even with the medication I am RXd I go to AA meeting 3-5 times a week. In fact, and I know I have mentioned a few times here already, today is my 1 year sober birthday, from alcohol and any other non-RXd medication. My sponsor knows my problems and backs me completely as he is a veteran himself who has and emergency benzos supply from the VA as well. It is better to have that on stand by in a real emergency than booze or hurting someone you care about.
Phil.McKeer
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I'm pretty sure all this talk about what constitutes being "clean" or not is a matter of semantics.
I'd say if you feel you are doing the right thing, you feel good about your life now compared to what it was before, who cares what it's called, or what it takes to do that. You're not running some hustle to scrounge together money to skip on responsibilities to do whatever is necessary to get high on dope. You're going to your doctor, like a responsible person does, and going to the pharmacy, and doing what you need to be doing to avoid a life you decided was not healthy.
Who cares what people's subjective definitions of that is. It's a marked improvement over the past.
I will say, though, that I think bupe is best utilized as part of a rapid taper. I'm sure some here have very good reasons to be on long-term maintenance, but I've never used so heavily to be able to know what it's like to be there.
Edit: Rapid taper assuming you do not have chronic pain issues. I understand using buprenorphine maintenance for chronic pain, or even for depression or anxiety in low doses (i.e. 2-8mg/day for pain, <1mg/day for depression/anxiety).
I'd say if you feel you are doing the right thing, you feel good about your life now compared to what it was before, who cares what it's called, or what it takes to do that. You're not running some hustle to scrounge together money to skip on responsibilities to do whatever is necessary to get high on dope. You're going to your doctor, like a responsible person does, and going to the pharmacy, and doing what you need to be doing to avoid a life you decided was not healthy.
Who cares what people's subjective definitions of that is. It's a marked improvement over the past.
I will say, though, that I think bupe is best utilized as part of a rapid taper. I'm sure some here have very good reasons to be on long-term maintenance, but I've never used so heavily to be able to know what it's like to be there.
Edit: Rapid taper assuming you do not have chronic pain issues. I understand using buprenorphine maintenance for chronic pain, or even for depression or anxiety in low doses (i.e. 2-8mg/day for pain, <1mg/day for depression/anxiety).
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Screaming_Skull
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Yes/No. On/Subs Methadone you are still taking opiates. I'm on Sub, two years now, haven't been the best so metadodne woueld probly be be better for me. But I wouldn't say a person using these drugs for maintianice is high, unless they've taken larger doses of prescribed or unprescribed meds. All I know my life is a whlole lot better now than if I woulda kept doing what I was doing, when I slip and go back to the old places to score some of the people I was hanging around with have NOTHING, living in a piece a crap trailer(they were in a shack for a bit) get all there money from selling there foodstamps,which they get a ridiciulous amount of....anyway they told me when I first started Subs " Well thats goood but,your just replacing one thing with another"....who is in a better place? I was around them all the time at least I have a job and some hope. So yes I think your sober if your on maintaince and do it right. If you wanna get alll AA technical about No you are a cheater getting high legally. Do what works for you, don't worry about what people think. I couldn't handle going to something like AA listneing to people " OH i relasped agian" then getting all down on themselves....fuck that it's deppressing. Now i"m sure there are some cool groups but thats not for me, I chose ORT.
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adder
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I've been on Suboxone for almost 3 years now, will be in November, and I started taking it 2 months or so after quitting methadone. The difference between taking methadone and buprenorphine is huge, compared to buprenorphine ethadone is just another full agonist with nasty side effects unrelated to opioid action, I'm sure you can be stable on any full agonist like you can be stable on methadone as long as you have a steady supply of your drug of choice, either free or at least not consuming most of your money. That's what makes methadone different from heroin, you don't have to chase it to have it. With that being said, I'm sure being on buprenorphine is definitely not like being sober either, it may feel so when you quit using heroin/morphine/etc. and start buprenorphine maintenance. I felt sober for sure because Suboxone finally killed the withdrawal and let me live a more or less normal life, if it wasn't for Suboxone, I'm sure I would never have quit benzodiazepines a year later, certainly not if I had stayed on methadone. If it wasn't for Suboxone, I wouldn't have started studying again. Bupe made me motivated to do stuff like I wasn't for years, so it was a big change, it was like the best antidepressant out there for the first couple of months, I was optimistic for the first time in like 10 years, imagine that, and imagine people who can feel this way after decades. It is a big change indeed no matter how you look at it. I collect my pills every two weeks and I will tell you one thing, there are very few people on Suboxone on my program (around 15 compared to 250-300 on methadone), so I rarely see another person on it, but once there is someone, I can spot them in no time, they are lively like non-addicts, and all the others on methadone have this characteristic emotionless expression on their faces and their movements are slow, it looks very sad to me because I remember myself looking exactly the same.
Of course with time buprenorphine loses its magic and taking it becomes much like a reflex for a cigarette, however, you're certainly much more bound to it. Life on buprenorphine is certainly much cleaner than on methadone or heroin/morphine. I'm sure it's much better as a transition drug than methadone too. During all these years on various opioids I never considered I might one day be so sick and tired of them that I would want to quit. And here I am fed up with Suboxone, I guess I'm much more physically dependent on it than I am psychologically addicted right now. It doesn't work so well as it used to, more and more often I can feel various pains, and when I catch cold, I always need much more buprenorphine than usually because I feel pain everywhere in my body. I don't know if it's plain tolerance or hyperalgesia, but I've been trying to taper down for months now and it's one hell of a drug to taper off. The pain-killing effect of a dose lasts like a few hours at most and then it's gone, and I need another dose even though I can feel it's still working because I can feel the side effects. Much of the pain is actually in my mind, it's always much much easier to quit any addiction when you can see some positive things in your life, if they're not people like friends or a partner, then perhaps satisfaction with your accomplishments. Well, it's hard to have either if you spent much of your life dulling yourself with drugs, right? I meet people at the university, other than that I don't really go out, but even when I get to know someone better, I just can't get rid of my past and I feel as if I was unworthy of any good person, I know I can't tell anyone about my past and at the same time I feel as if I needed to find someone whom I could tell without fearing they'd reject me. I guess it's because I can't accept my faults, I blame myself so much that deep inside I think someone accepting me as an ex-addict would make me accept myself too. Anyway, I'm sure I want to quit Suboxone, I wish I were off it right now if it was possible. I can feel how much stress I'm putting on myself when I can't decrease my dose or need to increase it again, but honestly speaking these 3 years on bupe showed me how I ruined my life with opioids among other stuff and I just want to be off it, I will be sooner or later, but somehow I know it's not the most important thing anyway.
Of course with time buprenorphine loses its magic and taking it becomes much like a reflex for a cigarette, however, you're certainly much more bound to it. Life on buprenorphine is certainly much cleaner than on methadone or heroin/morphine. I'm sure it's much better as a transition drug than methadone too. During all these years on various opioids I never considered I might one day be so sick and tired of them that I would want to quit. And here I am fed up with Suboxone, I guess I'm much more physically dependent on it than I am psychologically addicted right now. It doesn't work so well as it used to, more and more often I can feel various pains, and when I catch cold, I always need much more buprenorphine than usually because I feel pain everywhere in my body. I don't know if it's plain tolerance or hyperalgesia, but I've been trying to taper down for months now and it's one hell of a drug to taper off. The pain-killing effect of a dose lasts like a few hours at most and then it's gone, and I need another dose even though I can feel it's still working because I can feel the side effects. Much of the pain is actually in my mind, it's always much much easier to quit any addiction when you can see some positive things in your life, if they're not people like friends or a partner, then perhaps satisfaction with your accomplishments. Well, it's hard to have either if you spent much of your life dulling yourself with drugs, right? I meet people at the university, other than that I don't really go out, but even when I get to know someone better, I just can't get rid of my past and I feel as if I was unworthy of any good person, I know I can't tell anyone about my past and at the same time I feel as if I needed to find someone whom I could tell without fearing they'd reject me. I guess it's because I can't accept my faults, I blame myself so much that deep inside I think someone accepting me as an ex-addict would make me accept myself too. Anyway, I'm sure I want to quit Suboxone, I wish I were off it right now if it was possible. I can feel how much stress I'm putting on myself when I can't decrease my dose or need to increase it again, but honestly speaking these 3 years on bupe showed me how I ruined my life with opioids among other stuff and I just want to be off it, I will be sooner or later, but somehow I know it's not the most important thing anyway.
Screaming_Skull
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Oh, your differnt from me adder...Subs made me START using benzo's alot. i feel like with methadone since it's a full agonist and I never used benzo's that much whle using full agonist, plus I've seen too many people abusing benzos while on done' and I would not do it, it's scary. Now if they were prescribed to me and I took them as prescribed, like 1 or 2 a day, thats fine I knew people who did that and were fine. But Subs just make me wanna full agonist al the time, like tonight im on 75mg of Oxy, and I did take a xanax but just because oxy speeds me up so much, same with bupe. I take the benzo's unprespriced with my bupe because it kills the cravings for a full agonist, like say Morphine, Oxy, Dillies, Hydrocodone... But anyway everyone is different... and I know if I quit subs I will go striaghit back to using, I would be fine on a lowish dose of done a day i think (50-60mg). And honsety once I got my takehomes I would be fine, hell, it might work better when I get my take homes to split it into two doses 30 in the moring and 30 later on. But anyway, I've been trying to make subs work for two years and its just not...I just end up relasing all the damn time.
Edit: What dose are you on adder??? If you can get down to taking micro doses like 2mg in the morning and 1mg in the evening/night it will help the the pain better, it works more like a full agonis at doses of 4mg a day and under, but not taken all at once... like say 2mg in the first dose would be 500 micrograms if your taking it under the tounge, then every 6 hours or so take 1mg after that....look into it I may not be explaining it well I'm kinda high.
Edit: What dose are you on adder??? If you can get down to taking micro doses like 2mg in the morning and 1mg in the evening/night it will help the the pain better, it works more like a full agonis at doses of 4mg a day and under, but not taken all at once... like say 2mg in the first dose would be 500 micrograms if your taking it under the tounge, then every 6 hours or so take 1mg after that....look into it I may not be explaining it well I'm kinda high.
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