Quitting Heroin with a Fast Methadone Taper

[polo792]

Hi i was wondering if anyone has any experience with getting off heroin by using methadone for a short period? I have been using for a couple years, my dose currently is around 0.5g a day, however each time i have a shot the weight of the heroin is 0.08g so its not that much. I have been told that methadone would be a good option to get off heroin but the amount of days that one can be on methadone shouldn't exceed 5 days or so. If anyone can give me any advice or info if its doable or not.
The methadone is 40mls and i only have the one bottle that someone gave me, I also have the following to assist me to get off the heroin. A box of valiums and some weed to aid me with this task.
Any advice would be helpful.

 

[Jabberwocky]

i haven't heard of anyone doing this, but you have been told correctly about not wanting to use the meth for more than a couple of days- its withdrawal is longer than that of heroin so you'd be making a rod for your own back if you used too long.

have you kept the bottle in the fridge? i think it needs using up pretty quick so don't delay too long. the valiums and weed should help.

i would take as little as possible that holds you. 40mls isn't that much so you will still experience some withdrawal but it should smooth out the withdrawals. i have, accidentally a few times just by running out and going somewhere i couldn't score, done a couple of fast tapers off heroin - like dramatically reduced doses for like 2 or 3 days and experienced surprisingly little withdrawal once i did run out. so it should make the initial stage much easier.

problem is, the second i could score. i did. there is much more to stopping using than stopping using. you are using for a reason, you need to do some work to find out what heroin is doing for you and address the underlying issues. get all the help you can for this- drugs services, therapy, mutual support meetings (NA/SMART), looking after yourself, meditating.

 

[polo792]

I do have heroin as well but i intend to lock that away and like u said 40mls isn't much but all i want to do is just take a cap full from the bottle and see how i go.
how many days do you think the wd would last and am i just delaying it and really just go through cold turkey?

 

[Jabberwocky]

get rid of the dark!! by having it you are setting yourself up for failure.

tapering before you start the actual withdrawal process will make it significantly smoother. the smaller your habit before you jump off, the better. if you get like a day and a half into your actual rattle and then use, it will prolong the process, so i don't recommend that unless it gets really intolerable.

as i said before, it is really important to get some psychological help too. i have been through more rattles than i can count and thought i was just weak and pathetic cos i always went back to using pretty much immediately, but now i've actually gone through the recovery process i recognise that i was taking away an important crutch without doing anything to replace it, so i was bound to fail. you have a hard road ahead of you and at times it won't feel worth it, but it really is.

 

[Michelob88light]

Any recommendations Chin-up for what kind of Psychological stuff worked for you? This is my 5th time kicking opiates but I usually relapse around the 3rd week. Just the lack of energy and sense of malaise gets me falling off the wagon. This relapse was due to finding a stash of dilaudid 2.5’s I had in my beach house that of course I took the 2 hour flight back and forth to grab. Ended up doing 20 a day until all 430 pills were gone. Of course the w/d’s were brutal enough to get me to cop in the street. So now I’ve got half gram a day of H habit. Which I’m debating on making a slow taper while dealing with the issues that lead me to use. Sooooo finally after all my rambling...what psychological stuff in your personal experience did you find the most helpful that lead you to coming clean for a long period of time.
jaja sorry for the long winded question these quarantines have got my social awareness way tucked up lol.

 

[ChinaGroove]

As Chinup stated, there is an underlying reason that you started using Heroin in the first place.
This is why i'm generally not a fan of quick tapers and just rushing addicts off of their maintainence in general. This only addresses the physical dependence part of the addiction. It does nothing for the psychological (and much deeper and more complex) aspect with little diversion againt relapse.
Not to mention you mentioned you had some dope on hand...my goodness. I would seriously consider maintainence. I know it can be a hassle. But so is being an addict as we all know. Good luck I hope everything works out.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Any recommendations Chin-up for what kind of Psychological stuff worked for you?

in rehab we had to write out our 'life story' and that helped massively, just writing everything down, by the time i got to 10 on my timeline i could already see i'd had a lot of shit, so it took away some of the anger at myself for ending up this way and helped me start to forgive myself. i have also had EMDR to deal with trauma and could not have maintained recovery without it, its like magic. i talked in NA a lot, i did 90 in 90 and probably shared in 85 of those meetings. also meditation has helped greatly, and reading about different theories of addiction to try and understand better.

 

[JessFR]

First of all you will need to specify how many mg per ml the methadone is. It can vary.

I've never done it myself but my ex-bf used to swear there was an fairly easy way to taper off heroin using methadone. I forget exactly how he described it but it was something like switching between the methadone and heroin so they both gradually drop to nothing.

What I would probably do if I were trying this would be to tape down as low as possible with the methadone, then tape down a tiny bit further with heroin so that all you're left with is a mild heroin withdrawal. But... what works in theory can completely fall apart when junkie thinking gets involved. I'm sure we're all familiar with how even the best plans can end up failing because we just can't seem to actually follow them no matter how hard we try.

Which brings up what some other people have said, whether this is actually the best option. As was said you became a heroin addict for a reason, long term recovery rates are fairly poor when it's just someone trying to get off the drug and nothing else.

Depending on what your goals are and how you feel, you might want to incorporate support group meetings like NA or one of the others if that's not your thing. Or if possible a stay in rehab.

If I were just trying to get off heroin completely rehab would probably be my choice, but in my case I wasn't willing to do that so I got on a long term methadone program instead, which I am still on today.

I simply wasn't willing to quit, inspite of how much harm heroin had caused in my life. But I'm not you, and what was the best choice for me might not be for you.

I wish you good luck. Heroin addiction is a really horrible insidious condition.

 

[CfZrx]

Hi i was wondering if anyone has any experience with getting off heroin by using methadone for a short period? I have been using for a couple years, my dose currently is around 0.5g a day, however each time i have a shot the weight of the heroin is 0.08g so its not that much. I have been told that methadone would be a good option to get off heroin but the amount of days that one can be on methadone shouldn't exceed 5 days or so. If anyone can give me any advice or info if its doable or not.
The methadone is 40mls and i only have the one bottle that someone gave me, I also have the following to assist me to get off the heroin. A box of valiums and some weed to aid me with this task.
Any advice would be helpful.

This may not be what you are looking for, but I think it needs to be known. It is easy to transition from methadone to suboxone!!! A simple "fentanyl bridge" can be used to do so painlessly! You must be at a low dose of methadone for it to work in this manner. They say get to 30mg, but I did it at 15. I just took my last dose of methadone, waited 24 hours, put on a 50mcg fent patch for 48 hours, then removed fent patch, and immediately placed the sub under my toungue. Zero precipitated WDs.

 

[polo792]

So what ur saying is use the methadone first and then use the heroin for thr end stages of the detox process?
I dont have any underlying issues that lead me to use heroin and I'm not the type of person who likes talking about why I did wat I did. I didnt have a bad or abusive childhood so I'm not trying to numb any feelings. I guess I just fell into the wrong crowd and got involved in this mess. I have gotten cleaned before but relapsed due to boredom I guess.
Idk wat the best way to get this fkn monkey off my back, I just want to be a normal person the one I used to remember I was. Who enjoyed life n wat the next day brings, I miss being able to sleep in n not having to wake up cos I am going through wds.