tolerance never seems to go down

[opiobsessed]

I dont know if anyone here has this or if its just me, I have been into opiates for 3 years now and have been on suboxone 24mg daily for a year now. Now the strange thing I've noticed is even though I've been on that horrible poison pill(naltrexone) in the past and then had no naltrexone or anything for two weeks that even after 2 weeks I still had the same tolerance to opiates as when I went into rehab. I guess I don't understand totally about tolerance and overdosing etc. I still go on a hydro binge from time to time after stopping my suboxone and nothing seems to bring my tolerance down. What causes this? just so everyone has an idea of my usage, I started on 2 5/500 vicodin and after 3 years use off and on I now have to take 7 10/500 vicodin all at once to get same effect as 2 5/500. I hear all this stuff about naltrexone or naloxone potentiating opiates in very small doses but someone I met way back in rehab told me that naltrexone dulls your receptors or something and once you take that crap you can never get the same enjoyment out of any opiates ever again like you used to. What does that mean? I do notice since I was put on that naltrexone for half a week 2 years ago that to this day I dont seem to get as buzzed as I used to, but maybe its tolerance or what that person told me in rehab. I sure wish I knew more because I'd love to feel good again somehow.

[Curio]

where to begin???
well, no one knows really how the whole tolerance + addiction + rehab thing works when it comes down to the cellular biology of it all....Some people can go through one of those 10-20K medical 'coma' detoxes and if they were to go out and shoot up heroin like they used to, they would die of an OD...someone else would have the same tolerance even after all that medical 'treatment'...it's horribly complicated because the bottom line is that our bodies don't "read" textbooks!
~Side note: most docs want to pigeon-hole you ( as well as your diagnosis or prognosis) into a chart or graph they have or some formula they studied, and the human body (and I suppose the God who created it, for that matter) just laughs and laughs!! Sometimes we as a society make it worse by INSISTING on an "answer" or anything that will help us feel better or understand the situation.
long story short: there are lots of theories and there is a lot of speculation and "tricks" that supposedly work for various people...fact of the matter is that you may NEVER get your tolerance back to the way it was, even if you go years without an "external" opiate. I say external because once you take the external ones, that is where the body stops producing some of what it does naturally/internally....and that is where part of the problem lies.
Naltrexone is NOT a potentiator AT ALL...it is purely ANTAGONISTIC at the receptor site..meaning that it blocks or displaces opiates from fitting into that spot. There is a school of theory which believes that less tolerance and addiction problems develop when people take a medication that has agonist/antagonist characteristics, rather than straight agonist properties...But they don't really know WHY it may work for some people...once you have gotten to where you are at (and I am right there with you, so you're not alone!) you won't find a way "around" the fact that your tolerance is high and that there have been some changes in your brain (neuroreceptors, etc.) that MAY, in fact, be PERMANENT....
I don't believe I answered your question(S), but I'm afraid no one really HAS all the answers/facts; we all have a lot of our own theories, experiences, can share what we've read, etc..but there is a lot more that science does NOT know than it DOES know, about MOST things...

I think you would be well advised to find the section here at the forum where the "waismann" representative is a moderator and post your questions again there....if anyone would have some good scientifically-based answers for you, instead of my conjecture :) , it would be anyone associated with the Waismann-type Methods of rapid detox etc.

[HistoryofMadness]

I dont know if anyone here has this or if its just me, I have been into opiates for 3 years now and have been on suboxone 24mg daily for a year now...

... I still go on a hydro binge from time to time after stopping my suboxone and nothing seems to bring my tolerance down. What causes this? just so everyone has an idea of my usage, I started on 2 5/500 vicodin and after 3 years use off and on I now have to take 7 10/500 vicodin all at once to get same effect as 2 5/500.
First as you know the buprenorphine in suboxone is a very powerful opiate. It is different than most but still powerful. Secondly, 24mg a day is a pretty large dose (in my experience). Thirdly, according to my research the half life of buprenorphine can be as long as 60 hours or more, and probably no less than 24 hours. The average is around 36 hours.

This means that each day as you take subs, the level of the drugs in your system goes up... I have heard this called the 'clinical level' I think. Either way if more than half of what you take each day is still there the next day, then it only takes a few days to have many milligrams of the drug in your system. And the half life stays the same. So once the build up starts it will take a while to go back down.

I should note here that I am not a doctor, and gathered this info pretty informally, but it was accurate for my experience with subs.

Subs are for the committed. I eventually had to choose getting high or subs, for me they didn't work together no matter what I tried.

-H

[Bella]

Hey,a very old friend of mine has been using,not so much now,for almost 30 years and whether he uses for a year or 2 or not he has the biggest tolerance I've ever heard of.He reckons it's never gone down since his first mega habit in the dark ages-just a thought.come to think of it my tolerance I'd describe as a bitch,hmmn

[opiobsessed]

Its interesting learning all this stuff about opiates, I guess that's why they made subs the way they do, I know me for sure and most likely other opiophiles as well would not go without their daily subs for up to a week so that they can enjoy a buzz, unless they had some benzo's or something to sleep off the wd's that you would have to deal with otherwise if you just quit the subs cold turkey or even tried tapering off them too quickly. I notice with me, if I try skipping one of my 3 pills a day to try to get a buzz off them or go on a binge that even after 24 hours of no subs I'm in bad wd. I'm sure my metabolizm is too fast as well since my whole colon was taken out and my digestive troubles I"ve had all my life. When I went on these subs, I thought I never wanted to use again and go through that horrible wd ever again, but to this day I still crave opiates and I think I just want to be on opiates the rest of my life in some form or another. I think I was born with some type of internal natural opiate production problem or something because I can remember way back when I was little I used to have the same emotional and mental sadness etc as I do when I suffer wd's from external opiates. I dont recall many physical symptoms, but ever since I started using opiates I felt better than I ever have all my life, the only thing that puts me in rehab sometimes or scares me off them for a while is the unbearable wd's that I go through when I run out of money or source for them. The thing that sucks even more is I have trouble talking to people or communicating well so I have more trouble than usual finding hookups etc. I was just lucky to find the rop online pharms when I got going on vicodin again. I was just lucky for once in my life that I didn't get ripped off either, but of course I sure researched it all before I ordered from nww, I was so skeptical at first but to this day I will never forget that beautiful warm june day when my first 120 watson's came and I never had seen a bottle this full of pills before. I was so happy I felt I had died and gone to heaven and these pills could last me a month or more. Wow I'm fiending tonite