I want to add to the previous warnings about taking methodone and then suboxone afterwards. You willl wish you had read these articles and listened to your doctor (if he bothered to tell you) first. A friend of mine decided to get really high and take them together and ended up with a ride to the hospital and a stay there (where they also did not give him any opiods to stop the withdrawals.Great advice everyone, and I hope more folks read these posts before they try switching over. Also, for those of you struggling to pay for suboxone medication, medicaid pays for it, and there is also a program on the internetnet run by the federal government to reduce to cost about 80%. Good luck out there and remember we're all in this together.
There are a lot of factors when it comes to a question like this.
How long have you been taking the methadone? How many milligrams of methadone were you taking?
Even after you answer both of those questions, there still is not an exact answer to give, because everybody's body is different.
If you are taking 40mg+ of methadone, you are going to want to wait at LEAST 72 hours before you take your first dose. For 20-40mg of methadone waiting 48hrs after last dose should be okay, and if you are on a low dose (5-10mg) 24hrs should be okay. What you would want to do if you are on a high dose is slowly ween yourself down to about 20mg of methadone, and then wait for 2 days.
If you are on a very high dose, you are going to have to go through 3-4 days of pure hell before you can take the suboxone because of the fact that methadone (and other opioids) have a much longer half-life than heroin, morphine, or other actual opiates.
But these numbers are approximate, not absolute. The best way to answer this question is to not think about the length before your last dose of your drug of choice, but how you feel. You want to be in ABSOLUTE and FULLBLOWN withdrawal before you take the suboxone. If you are really sick, still wait a little bit longer. If you don't, you will end up having worse withdrawals because the Buprenorphine in the Suboxone will rip the opiates/opiods right off of your receptors, and you will be forced into precipitated withdrawal.
This will last for another day or two, and there is nothing you will be able to do. Taking more methadone or more suboxone will not reverse the precipitated withdrawal, once it starts it cannot be stopped.
My advice, take a few days off of work/school and wait as long as possible, and then your first dose of Suboxone will give you pure bliss. Not bliss as in euphoria, but bliss as in you will now feel as normal as you did before you got yourself into the mess you are now in.
Wait as long as you possibly could... This was the worst experience of my life, It just happened today so I was on here researching it.. My girlfriend and I were clean for a while and we messed up for like a month and we took methadone at the end for 3 days, the first day we took 60mg, then 50mg, then 40mgs.... This morning we woke up and we actually didn't feel bad, I was just being lazy and stayed in bed and she was up playing with our son. We were okay but decided to take suboxone, because we have a script for it and thought it would be okay.... Like not even 15 minutes later we had instant withdrawals, the WORST I've ever had in my life. She was having them too. Really it was unbearable, we were prepared for aches, and kicks and hot and cold but this was like the max of everything. We read about it on here and it says not to take it for 48-72 hours. Methadone has an after-life which we both knew and just thought it would be fine but it wasn't.... So wait until you can't take it anymore... We ended up having to use because we really couldn't handle it...We got heroin like 2 hours later and were nervous to do it because we didn't want to get more sick, well we didn't, it actually took the sickness away and you don't get high (which was okay with us because really we're looking to get clean).... SO DON'T TAKE SUBOXONE AFTER METHADONE.. I would imagine this would happen with all other opiates too, like vikes, percs, heroin... The time with those is just shorter.. Like 8-12hrs after doing those you can take a suboxone
I actually take suboxone and when I went to the Dr. To get put on it it was recommended to be clean at least 2 days. From my experience I would would wait about 24 hours to take the suboxone. If you take it too soon it could cause you to go into full withdraw from the methadone. Do not take anything else while you are taking suboxone. You WILL NOT FEEL IT AND COULD OD!!!
