Author: Romeo

Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2012 12:00 am

Hey BabyLove,

Welcome to the forum!!

I wanted to mention that Buprenorphine is the active ingredient in Suboxone. Buprenorphine has been around for a long time, but it was mostly used in small doses (.2mg) in Europe for pain relief. High Dose Buprenorphine, aka-Suboxone, does come in 2mg/.5mg and 8mg/2mg (the bolded numbers represent the Naloxone content). I mention all of this to give you an idea of how much Buprenorphine your fiancee is ingesting and to maybe give you a little bit better idea of how to taper her off. Think of Suboxone in MicroGrams instead of MilliGrams.

You’re going to give her 4000mcg tomorrow, which is perfectly fine. When it comes time to taper, instead of thinking, "I’ll cut her down by 1mg or 2mg" think instead in MicroGram doses…..you would be cutting her dose by 1000mcg or 2000mcg….that’s a LOT!!

After reading NUMEROUS taper threads on this site and following those folks over the 2 years I’ve been here, I’ve found the most successful taperers cut their dose (once below the ceiling of 4mg) by about 10% or so and a lot of those people wait a MINIMUM of a week or two at the new dose before they attempt their next taper.

Suboxone is a powerful drug, especially at the levels we addicts have to take. You want to remove that drug from her system slowly, this is the best way to minimize wd, in my opinion.

As far as supplements to help ease wd, I would wait until she was a lot closer to jumping. I’ve seen people start taking Clonidine weeks and weeks before jumping and it didn’t do that much to help them. I took Clonidine after I got off Suboxone and it helped me a lot. Clonidine is non-habit forming, so no worries there, but she does need to get her blood pressure checked first because, like tinydancer said, it is a blood pressure medication. I’ve heard good things about Neurontin too, but I never used it myself.

Best of luck to both of you!