HeadChange

The Buprenorphine (Suboxone) Detox Diary — Wise words, intro

Sorry about the ram­bling guys, I like to give a nice back­ground when post­ing things like this. It is infor­ma­tional, the next post will be less rant­ing and rav­ing. Skip the sci­ence stuff.

In the USA, an esti­mated 2.4 mil­lion of us unlucky cit­i­zens have prob­lems with opi­ate addic­tion. Ever since the devel­op­ment of opium and mor­phine, these drugs have been hit­ting us like a plague. The point of this mini-blog/category is to inform those who are on a buprenor­phine detox plan and those who need help with their addic­tions to opioids.

There has been tons of talk recently about how ter­ri­ble it is to stop tak­ing Sub­ox­one or Sub­u­tex after detox­ing from other drugs like heroin, oxy­codone, mor­phine, hydrocodone etc. This talk about how you will be sick for 2 months, or how you are going to go into with­drawal so bad that you can’t move, is not going to help any­one try­ing to stop tak­ing the subs. I’ll be cre­at­ing daily blog posts about my expe­ri­ence with sub­ox­one recession.

Before mak­ing the deci­sion to quit, it’s a good idea to learn about the drug and how it works (if you don’t know already). Buprenor­phine is a semi-synthetic opi­oid derived from the­baine. It’s chem­i­cal name is 17-(cyclopropylmethyl)-alpha-(1,1-dimethylethyl)-4,5-epoxy– 18,19-dihydro-3-hydroxy-6-methoxy-alpha-methyl-6,14– ethenomorphinan-7-methanol. It has obvi­ously gain some rep­u­ta­tion for it’s abil­ity to help those addicted to opi­ates detox with­out feel­ing with­drawal symp­toms. The drug is mar­keted and sold in a few dif­fer­ent forms includ­ing Sub­ox­one (buprenor­phine & nalox­one), Sub­u­tex (buprenor­phine) and Temgesic.

When­ever you become depen­dent on opi­ates, the struc­ture of your brain under­goes vast changes. When a per­son uses any kind of opi­oid drug, the drug trav­els to the brain and sat­u­rate those recep­tors result­ing in eupho­ria, basi­cally stim­u­lat­ing your opi­ate recep­tors.  The more you take opi­oids, the more you mess up those pre­cious opi­ate recep­tors. Buperenor­phine is said to acti­vate those recep­tors, mak­ing you feel… not sick. Sci­en­tif­i­cally, the opi­ates you take does not cause sick­ness or with­drawal symp­toms, it’s your brain.

Since Buperenor­phine was approved by the FDA, it has been help­ing us unfor­tu­nate ones with over­com­ing opi­ate depen­dency. Most doc­tors will tell you that you will not undergo with­drawal symp­toms after tak­ing Bupe because it is not a full-antagonist like heroin, mor­phine etc., it’s only a partial-antagonist, but the inter­net com­mu­nity will tell you dif­fer­ently. If you do a search for “sub­ox­one with­drawal”, you will find tons of forum threads that say the same thing. None of them are any help, they will all just dis­cour­age you to jump off the wagon.

Alright, with all the sci­en­tific stuff behind us, let’s get to busi­ness. I’m a 21 year old male, Cau­casian, about 150 pounds. I’ve been tak­ing var­i­ous amounts of Sub­ox­one tablets for a lit­tle over two years now. Most of this time, I self-medicated, some of the time, being pre­scribed by a physi­cian. Over the last year or so, I’ve been prepar­ing to stop tak­ing the evil orange pill by taper­ing down from 8mg a day to about 0.5mg a day.  I have tried to quit about 10 times through­out my few years of using Sub­ox­one, with no success.

Each time, I’ve learned more and more about the drug. This time (already at day 3), I have a cou­ple other strate­gies. First off, I have been exper­i­ment­ing with Kratom (Mitrag­yna spe­ciosa). Kratom is an opioid-antagonist which has been used since the 19th cen­tury for opium sub­sti­tu­tion and opium addic­tion. I have tried Kratom a few years back, before my affair with hydrocodone, oxy­codone, mor­phine and hydro­mor­phone. I bought an ounce of leaf from one of my trusted ven­dors (Oh yeah, Kratom is legal, unsched­uled, except Thai­land). After brew­ing up the nasty tast­ing Kratom, it pro­duced the same effects as I had pre­vi­ously felt after tak­ing 14mg or hydrocodone. With this in mind, I picked up some higher qual­ity, Kratom extract for this journey.

Also, I plan on con­tin­u­ously hydrat­ing, to keep my body cleansed and refreshed. I’ve been think­ing about herbal detox, but I’m still unsure about that. Before even think­ing about stop­ping the flow of buprenor­phine, here’s a few things you need to keep in mind.

1. It’s going to be hard to sleep. Pre­pare to sleep in small intervals.
2. You’ll be in pain for at least a cou­ple days, so if you work, it would be a good idea to take the first few days off.
3. You are in con­trol. If you keep telling your­self that you feel ter­ri­ble, that you need the pills, that you can’t do it, etc… You will most likely fail.

Even after feel­ing like utter shit, you can make your­self feel bet­ter with opti­mism. Con­stantly tell your­self that you can do it, this is noth­ing, I can­not wait to be free from this drug. If you lay in bed all day, you are going to feel like shit. You need to be active, if you need to take a shower every time you feel like your mus­cles are tied in a knot. If you can heat up your mus­cles (with a hot shower) and con­tinue to be active, you will feel much better.

One of the worst parts of the with­drawal is the insom­nia. It’s impos­si­ble to feel any bet­ter the next day if you were toss­ing and turn­ing in bed all night long. If you can, get some type of seda­tives to help you get rest. Ben­zo­di­azepines will work the best, but not every­one can get access to them. Per­son­ally, I use Kratom, Kava Kava, Valer­ian, Cat­nip and Mela­tonin. Really, any type of seda­tive will help you out.

No mat­ter what, don’t com­plain to your doc­tor or try to score an 8 off your buddy. Stay strong.

Most doc­tors will tell you not to worry about with­drawal symp­toms, they will tell you it’s all in your head. I think this is par­tially true, when your body is depen­dent on a drug, it is going to freak out when it doesn’t have it any­more. It’s nat­u­rally going to depress your mind and body. Espe­cially in the case of buprenor­phine, once you are done tak­ing it, you’re not going to feel com­pletely okay. The rea­son you were given bupe is because it fills a void in your brain that opi­ate use cre­ated, so, once you are com­pletely with­out any type of opi­oid, your brain will not remem­ber how to pro­duce the hor­mones and chem­i­cals that it nat­u­rally makes, mak­ing you feel like shit.

The biggest thing about quit­ting is that no mat­ter what you’re try­ing to stop doing, you are not going to feel great for a while. For exam­ple, in my sit­u­a­tion, my brain has not pro­duced it’s nat­ural opi­ates in over 3 years, so when I stop tak­ing sub­ox­one, I am going to feel ter­ri­ble for a long time (That’s just the truth. It’s not pes­simism, it’s real­ity). This would be the same if I had been doing heroin for 3 years, it’s all the same con­cept, think back to one of the first para­graphs, opi­ate addic­tion changes the struc­ture of your brain.

Any­ways, by the end of the day I will have a new post here that is actu­ally describ­ing how I am feel­ing and what I am doing to feel bet­ter. I just feel that the more you know about your enemy, the bet­ter off you are.

Tags: detox, heroin, hydrocodone, kava, morphine, opioids, oxycodone, wild lettuce, withdrawal