Hello cleanwithdreams7, I just read your story and I am happy to hear that you decided to get help with your opiate addiction and also happy to hear that methadone is helping you do that. I am on it also, I go to a clinic on monday's to get my doses for the week and every other monday I have counciling and I also put together an ma group, which stands for methadone anonymous. I tried to come off of methadone really fast and then stopped and started to taper of 2 mg a week instead of 5mg a week. When you start to feel symptoms of w/d I had them bump me back up to where I was before I felt them. I let my body catch up to my brain and after a couple of weeks, start to come down as you feel comforatable doing so. It's not a race, so don't feel like you have to hurry the process. Also it's going to be different after you stop methadone, you may have thoughts you never had while on it. My suggestion is you get a plan, if your not working towards recovery your working towards a relapse. I can't smoke marijuana because if I want to get takehomes and not have to go to the clinic daily, I had to quit. I thought it was going to be hard, and it is at times. But the more I went to meetings and talked about my recovery with other addicts and my councilor the easier it got to not smoke it anymore. I don't have alot of hard feelings about smoking and alot of that comes from the fact that Iam 29 yrs old and have been sober 18 months from everything including pot and 2 years from opiates on dec. 4th and I never lost myself just smoking like I did when I did opiates. But I don't think I would of learned what I learned without giving it up but everybody's different. I just wanted to suggest that you make a plan now, have a list of ppl you can call if you have any bad thoughts, get a sponsor or somebody that can mentor you because that will help you learn the principals of trust in the recovery process, you know addict helping addict. Good luck to you! I am new to the forum also but not new to recovery.