View Single Post
Old 12-15-2006, 09:36 PM
  # 1 (permalink)  
jasoncy
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Michigan.
Posts: 11
Methadone Tapering...

Just had a question about tapering off methadone. I was going to try tapering off opiate pills back in july when I had a few weeks off work- but just did'nt have the will-power to do it at the time. Now that it's near vacation time again at work it will probably be the last chance to try again for awhile.

Even though in the past I've tried all kinds of different pills: (morphine, oxycontin, vicodin, percocet, etc...) For most of this year I only have taken methadone pills and codeine since I'm prescribed the methadone pills from one doctor, and have access to tylenol 3 from another doctor if I want, or cross the border from where I live in michigan to ontario, Canada to pick the 8-milligram codeine/aspirin pills to use with the cold water extraction technique to filter out the aspirin to get the codeine.

For most of this year I've taken a 10mg methadone pill along with a large dose of codeine at the same time to get a better high, since the methadone alone did'nt do too much.

For the last 3 days I've just taken one 10mg methadone pill each day, and not any codeine at all, and so far have'nt really felt too many withdrawal symptoms like I usually would if I quit taking opiates altogether, just no high like I normally would if I would have taken the codeine along with it.

On another web-site, (heroin-helper) i think it was it said tapering with methadone you should try to be tapered off completely in 7 days, does anyone know if this is a good timeframe to use? or should it be a little longer than 7 days? Also what dosage of methadone should I go to after this? (I have a pill splitter so can cut it down to however small is needed) Should I taper down to half a pill 5 milligrams for the rest of the time or a little less each day from here on out?

Also one last concern I had with the methadone, I saw on one of those rapid-detox sites that methadone can stay in your body for 22 hours? so they suggested people coming in for rapid detox take a short acting opiate before coming in (like morphine) to avoid problems with the detox. So the worry I have with the methadone for tapering is am I going to have withdrawal symptoms a couple days down the road, after I'm all done taking the pills- because of the length of time methadone stays in the body? or at that point in time, will it not really make much of a difference because of it being such a small amount of methadone being taken at the end of the taper anyway?
Or would I be better off just taking a small dosage of the codeine on the last few days of the tapering, instead of the methadone?
jasoncy is offline