Everytime I want to be done I get a couple of suboxone to start me off so that I'm not dying. I've been using oxy for 3 years and have been banging dope and oxy for the last year. I want to stop so bad, and if I have my subs to get my through the day I obviously don't have withdrawls. Mentally, if I'm not around ANYTHING or see ANYTHING I'm fine until the third night. I get out class go home and immediatly want to get high.. WHY IS THIS?! Why can't I make it past day 3?

Everytime I want to be done I get a couple of suboxone to start me off so that I'm not dying. I've been using oxy for 3 years and have been banging dope and oxy for the last year. I want to stop so bad, and if I have my subs to get my through the day I obviously don't have withdrawls. Mentally, if I'm not around ANYTHING or see ANYTHING I'm fine until the third night. I get out class go home and immediatly want to get high.. WHY IS THIS?! Why can't I make it past day 3? Difficult question that no one is likely to know the answer to. I sense you have some desperation, hence ur post. There are things you can do to push urself past day 3. I can now go 3 weeks without using. I would be happy to discuss it with you in some detail. Send me an email and I will email you back. It is possible, there is hope and it can be done. Cheers L

Everytime I want to be done I get a couple of suboxone to start me off so that I'm not dying. I've been using oxy for 3 years and have been banging dope and oxy for the last year. I want to stop so bad, and if I have my subs to get my through the day I obviously don't have withdrawls. Mentally, if I'm not around ANYTHING or see ANYTHING I'm fine until the third night. I get out class go home and immediatly want to get high.. WHY IS THIS?! Why can't I make it past day 3? Difficult question that no one is likely to know the answer to. I sense you have some desperation, hence ur post. There are things you can do to push urself past day 3. I can now go 3 weeks without using. I would be happy to discuss it with you in some detail. Send me an email and I will email you back. It is possible, there is hope and it can be done. Cheers L Isn't it because it takes 3 days for your body to fully expunge the opiates from your body? The third day of a detox is known to be the worst. Supposedly, it starts to get progressively easier after then... Jeff_D

the trick to getting thru the early stages for me has always been to keep my mind off it. Someone once told me a long time ago there is no craving in the world a new playstion game and a bag of weed won't get you through The thing about junkies who smoke weed is this: sometimes it makes you feel better, sometimes it just makes it worse. Either way you take your chances. for me personally a big bag of sticky buds and ratchet and clank can take me thru the worst stages. The weed makes me contemplative and more able to focus on the videogame, thereby taking my mind off my wds. Good luck, soldier. regards, sk3tch

Everytime I want to be done I get a couple of suboxone to start me off so that I'm not dying. I've been using oxy for 3 years and have been banging dope and oxy for the last year. I want to stop so bad, and if I have my subs to get my through the day I obviously don't have withdrawls. Mentally, if I'm not around ANYTHING or see ANYTHING I'm fine until the third night. I get out class go home and immediatly want to get high.. WHY IS THIS?! Why can't I make it past day 3? Hi Wildthing I think I can see a couple of things here. First as Jeff said it takes about three days before withdrawal gets to its worst  stages and even if you are taking suboxone/subutex your brain is certainly going to notice that you've swapped over to something else, even if most of the physical withdrawal is held off by the subs. While your opiate receptors are filled by the subbies your system is still bound to notice that you aren't giving it a daily  boost of euphoria by having a hit. I don't know enough  neurochemistry to say exactly why that is but I'd guess it has something to do with a very rapid dopamine release, but don't quote me on it! So in a sense you are hooked on two things the drug itself  and the rush your brain gets when you have a hit. By taking the subs you are replacing one but not the other. Even methadone which does have some euphoria attached to it doesn't really replace having a hit and plenty of people who start on methadone are still craving a hit early (or even late ) in the process even though technically the methadone should be covering all their withdrawals. The US theory with methadone seems to be that if you are given enough methadone your cravings will stop, I'm not so sure that is correct. I know plenty of people on high doses of methadone who still crave a hit . If direct substitution programs like  that really worked why do so many people still want a hit on top of their methadone? And why is it (IV) such a difficult practice to give up even when in theory your receptors are completely filled by methadone? I don't want to start banging a drum about needle use again because I mentioned it in a post the other day but IMHO it is pretty difficult to go from IV use to any other method of administration and even more so to stop using that way altogether. I know all the financial arguments i.e. you'd probably get 2 hits from a single dose of  what you'd need to smoke or snort just to hold you and it is  pretty hard to dispute that, especially if finances are tight. Every time you have a hit you are giving your brain a boost of chemicals that its very difficult to match the intensity of  by any other method. Yes you can get enough into you by other means to hold off withdrawal  or get stoned but your brains expectations have already been raised and its going to keep nagging at you until it gets what it's come to expect. If you are in full blown withdrawal you are obviously going to want a hit as soon as the withdrawal kicks in so the two things tend to get mixed up together, its only when the physical withdrawal is taken care of by something else that you notice how strong the crave for a hit is by itself.. The 3rd to somewhere around the 5th days of withdrawal are usually the worst and you will probably find that's when your craving is strongest. As it is you are not making it past the third day so its difficult to know what your cravings for a hit are going to be like on those later days. As someone said there seems to be a note of desperation in your question and I can quite understand where that comes from, believe me I've felt it myself!. On one hand you desperately want to stop using dope  but you're constantly frustrated in your attempts by the desire for a hit. There's also an element of what I like to call a cherry high (thanks Shane!) I felt this a lot of the time I was using and I'm sure many other users have felt the same thing. It's that desire to have one really good hit before you quit. I cant even remember the number of times I felt that If I could just have one good hit like the ones when I first started using I could probably stop whether that's true or not (being able to stop after) I don't really know but I do know that many of us spend our entire junk careers chasing that cherry high and of course the simple mechanics of addiction/tolerance are always going to deny that reward to you. Ok so what can you do? Well first of you can forget about getting a cherry high it's just not going to happen and no matter how stoned you can manage to get it's still not going to be as good as the first few hits you had where your brain was basically unprepared for what happened to it. Secondly you need a reason(s) to give up dope and it has to be  one that you can live with and marshal evidence for, because you are going to need it for the internal battles to come.. In my experience its very  hard  to give up for another person no matter what you feel about them, you have to do it for yourself.. That sounds selfish I know but if you give up for someone else there's always the possibility that they wont be there in the future and what are you going to do then? Thirdly never say never a lot of addicts (myself included) find it very difficult to imagine never having another hit, so don't tell yourself   this is my last hit ever . Try to put the decision off until some undetermined future. I know that seems counter intuitive and even completely wrong by some standards, but it's a battle you are better fighting at some later stage when you may have more control and better mental resources. All you really need for now is a desire not to use for the foreseeable future. Don't worry about what you might do in 10 or 15 years time, trust me it's a lot easier on your head if you don't commit yourself to things that currently you can barely conceive of.  I'm not a big fan of the 12 steps but living each day as it comes and taking it one day at a time does make a certain amount of sense. As I said the other day I don't know if its possible to give up dope completely while you are using IV. Certainly I've never seen it and personally I found it impossible to give up while using in that fashion. It's a very drastic change in your behaviour to go from IV to nothing  so I'd suggest the first thing to do is to stop using dope that way if you can possibly manage it. I tried a lot of different therapies over 20 + years , some fairly unusual ones along with the more standard rehabs and methods but nothing worked until a methadone program I was determined to stick to gave me a long enough break from IV use to remove it from the equation. Even then it was something I only saw with hindsight! Certainly a methadone or suboxone/subutex course is something you could look at, but they both have their drawbacks and while it worked for me, it was more down to good luck and  the gaining of  a few insights along the way rather than any good planning on my part. I get the feeling that these are options that you either haven't considered or don't want to do? I'd be the first to say avoid methadone (or at least long term methadone) if you can figure out some way of stopping on your own and make it work. But if you cant do that then methadone or subs may give you a chance to put down the needles for long enough to get a better idea of how much IV use is keeping you from your goal. If you don't want to go down that route I guess your best option (finances allowing) is to try to stop using IV by going to something like smoking or snorting. Every day you don't have a hit makes it a little easier not to go back to it. I  know its going to be difficult , frustrating (especially if you are just maintaining your habit rather than trying to get stoned) and often seemingly pointless since you will still be using dope, but I don't think anyone ever suggested that giving up dope was easy (except morons who have never been in the situation). This is going to be a hard fight for you there's no point in me pretending otherwise. Your system isn't going to like having its most intense source of pleasure cut back or stopped and you will be fighting yourself all the way. Don't give up, it is possible to do it and every failed detox gives you a few more tools to better handle the next one, eventually you will get it right so don't beat yourself up too much if you have a few failures along the way. There is a lot of  knowledge available on ADH and in the archives  and plenty of people who can give you tips on the best ways to deal with withdrawals. There's usually someone online who is willing to talk to you and try to keep you going through those rough nights and unless you go with some kind of substitution program you are almost certainly going to have them. The important thing is not to give up trying! A life on methadone (maybe subs too I'm not too sure on that one) is certainly an option and many people are happy to be on it for life. Personally I think it's a reasonable way of handling the situation and I wouldn't criticise anyone for doing it and indeed for some people it may be the *only* way to deal with it.  However in your case it does sound a bit like you are sick of the merry -go- round  and would like to get off . So if I could give you a single tip to make your journey easier I'd say try to stop or cut down  the IV use by whatever methods you can. It wont cure your drug addiction by itself  and there are still plenty of mental and physical hurdles you will have to overcome but as a first step I'd say it's pretty hard to beat. Good luck! AG