What is the highest dose of methadone SWIY has been on...and gotten off?

[Cruella]

Swim has been asking for info on subutex to get off a high dose of methadone. Recently swim sought the expertise of a clinic that uses this type of detox and walked away more confused than before! There were 2 physicians who spoke to swim and gave two different sets of instructions.

Dr. #1 said there had been a patient just a week ago who lied about the dosage he was taking. He was treated for a 100mg daily habit. The clinic received a frantic phone call a few days later because their patient ended up in the E.R. having some bad withdrawl symptoms. This patient was apparently taking 150mg per day. The clinic took him off suboxone, put him on 60mg of methadone in addition to subutex. Dr. #1 recommended swim do the same.

Dr. #2 told swim to stop taking methadone for as long as possible, suggesting at least 1-2 days if it could be tolerated, then swim would begin taking subutex and only subutex.

Swim is wondering what the highest dosage of methadone swiy has been on and maybe gotten off of. Also if swiy used this method to come off swim would love to hear how it went.

Thanx for your time and input!

[Gappa]

SWIM did the exact same thing, and hate to say it, any way you do it you will suffer to some xtent no matter what. Dr # 2 is correct. Dr 1 is telling you BS you cannot possibly take them together at the same time. SWIM has no personal experience trying to take them together but I would like to see if someone else has anything to say.

[Dickon]

As for Growltiger, my cat, he's been prescribed methadone at the rather odd dose of 100mg oral a day and 9 50mg amps a day. That's about 164 mg total a day. The highest dose he's taken in a day is 700mg but that was i.v. (3 hits, 250, 250 and 200). His highest average daily use has been about the 300mg mark. This pales into insignificance compared with someone in the medical literature on a prescription of 2000mg a day. Sadly, I cannot remember the details of the paper in which I read this information but, if I come across it again and remember, I'll post it here. There were however no details about this person, so, subject to checking my source, no new information is to be found in the original paper.

Growltiger is now off methadone and all drugs for over a month, and he seems to think that once you get above 150mg-200mg day, maybe less, there's no additional difficulty in quitting, since the top end of a big habit is fairly easy to knock on the head. He quit recently from 225mg a day, and says getting down to 50mg a day wasn't all that bad. From 40mg on out, he says, it was far far harder, and caused much meowing and yowling. Details of Growltiger's reduction and stopping are on "Screaming in the air" in this section of the forum: in essence, from 145mg a day, he simply reduced by 5mg a day until 0. He used clonidine and diclofenac (a non-steroidal anti-inflamatory like aspirin and ibuprofen but maybe a bit stronger) for the last few days of the taper and the first few days totally off to help him through the worst nights.

He tells me to say quitting is doable, however big a dose you're on, and to wish everyone luck who's trying. I second that!

Dickon [and Growltiger, the Bengal cat]