DOSE:

60 mg

oral

Methadone

(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

I have been dependent on opiates for about seven years, and I'm only 21. It all started when I was around 13, and my doctor prescribed me hydrocodone for an ankle injury. The first vicodin didn't kill the pain, so I decided to take another 1.5. When the pills finally took effect I got my very first nod, and I was quite impressed. It was around this time that I noticed that my father was an addict, because when I went to get my pills out of the medicine cabinet, there was only one left out of twenty and I had only taken 2.5.

Nothing was ever said about it but I soon realized that my father was taking opiates every day, and he had chronic pain and a regular prescription for percocet 7.5mg. My dad did indeed have a legitimate complaint, but he was taking alot more than he needed for pain, sometimes his prescription for 210 percocet only lasted a few days. I didn't really become a regular user of opiates until the next year, when I started taking morphine that my stepfather was prescribed, and it was all downhill after that. For the next five years I took at least two hundred milligrams of morphine a day, sometimes I would take as much as four hundred milligrams, and I loved it...for a while. I would go through periodic WDs when I couldn't get to my mom's house to steal morphine, and I would take percocet during those times, if dad hadn't finished them off too early. The last two years were really bad, my step father got kicked off the pain clinic and didn't get morphine any more, and I had to buy OC's off the street, which are incredibly expensive, usually they are around a dollar per mg, so I was spending as much as 100.00 a day just to stay out of WDs. This couldn't go on for long or I would end up in prison, so I decided to come forward and tell my dad about my addiction. That was the best decision I ever made, because when it got out in the open, my dad told me about his twenty year addiction. My dad and mom are both opiate addicts, and my maternal grandparents were both opiate addicts, and most of the living members of my family are opiate addicts! So the deck was stacked against me genetically speaking.

I told my dad that when I took my first opiate, it felt like something had been missing and that I had found it, it wasn't just about the euphoria, which was nice, but it really felt like I was unbalanced before opiates and I only felt normal when I would take them. My dad said that he had a very similar experience when he started, and we came to the conclusion that the several generations of opiate abusers that came before me may have caused an endorphin imbalance, and that is when my dad recommended that I try methadone. He had been taken off of percocet a few years before this due to liver problems from the massive amounts of APAP in the percs, and his doctor put him on Oxycontin at first, then he switched to methadone because it was much cheaper and it lasted longer. So my dad gave me three 10mg methadone, and in about an hour and a half, all of my WD symptoms were gone and I had no cravings whatsoever! I told my mom about it and she said that she had been put on methadone by her doctor as well, and so had my stepfather (the one that got kicked out of the pain clinic for a dirty urine screen). I took methadone illegally for a few weeks, and then I told my dad that I was going to get on MMT and try to get my shit together. I had successfully detoxed and went through WDs many, many times but I could not stay off of the opiates because I felt very strange without something in my opiate receptors, and even after several months with nothing, I would still feel like something was just wrong.

At the beginning of my second year in college, I got inducted into a methadone program at 20mg, but they raised my dose 10mg a day until I got to 40mg. I stayed a 40mg for a while, then I was upped another 20mg over several days and I am currently taking 60mg a day. It was a little hard for me at first, driving to the clinic every morning at 6AM to dose, and being forced to piss in a cup while a nurse watched through a little window in the bathroom at least twice a month, but it wasn't too bad once I got used to it. Now I am able to concentrate on the important aspects of my life, and I only have to pay $9.00 a day for my dose, so I have completely changed my life for the better. I do not even think about drugs any more, my thoughts before starting treatment were constantly about getting drugs and taking drugs, so it was a huge relief to be able to do normal things again without obsessing over opiates. I am currently in my senior year at a state university, and I have a pretty high GPA, and I would not have been able to do it without the help of methadone, God, and the understanding of my family.

It is still an addiction, but it is not the same because I can concentrate on the things that matter to me and I can live a normal life, and it is not harder to kick methadone than it is to kick other opiates, it just takes longer which means I have to taper off a little bit slower, but it is much less painful than the intense mental and physical agony of morphine withdrawal.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 66351
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 9, 2016	Views: 2,556
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Methadone (166) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Addiction & Habituation (10), Various (28)