This is why I switched to heroin.

Re: suboxone; I have a friend who was a heroin addict and was undergoing replacement therapy with suboxone and was fairly well controlled (although he relapsed about 8 months in his therapy. He then was selling his 8:2 mg sublingual films for a very reasonable price to ther heroin addicts (especially considering the relatively large cost of a box of this medication) effectively opening his own underground suboxone clinic. People here may think that this is wrong, but I really think it is commendable as there were several individuals who would have taken heroin on any of the given days that they bought suboxone from him. I don't know if anyone including him actually succeeded in stopping their heroin use due to suboxone replacement however... like I said even he relapsed a little over half a year after starting. That is the problem with replacement-therapy: it rarely completely works. Sure, they may not do heroin for a long time, but eventually most people do switch back as often the street opiate is cheaper than the suboxone or methadone.

The drug buprenorphine is weird, I took 4 mg once and while the effects were strong and opiate-like they were in no way euphoric. If anything I can only describe the drug as a "deliriant-opioid" as I was having very weird dream-like visions but they were totally meaningless as far as I could tell and none were memorable enough to still have with me. It was just really strong and uncomfortable. I doubt anyone would really abuse this drug (I'm sure some do), but I recommend just staying away from it as it is rather stupid for recreation. It did do away with my back pain, of course.

I forgot to mention, my mother is on butrans (buprenorphine-alone) 24 hour transdermal patches and says that her pain is very well controlled by it. She got in a car wreck a few years ago and has a rather messed up shoulder from it. I don't like that she is on such a drug 24 hours a day 7 days a week but I am currently taking kratom for my back issue on a daily basis (6-12 grams as needed, usually once or twice a day depending on how bad it is) so I can't really say anything about it. Taking opioids for chronic pain is not an answer, not permanently at least, for obvious reasons. They stop working and the W/D's can be worse than the original pain... and they reduce pain-tolerance as well... so I've been checking out alternative routes as well.
I recently found out that NMDA-antagonists decrease opioid tolerance and can prevent tolerance from occurring as rapidly, so I have been occasionally coadministering ~90mg DXM with my kratom and found that I could effectively cut my dose in half and still get relief. I think anyone with chronic pain should consider trying DXM or some other NMDA-antagonist for this reason. My tolerance was getting absurd due to the quantities of leaf I am having to take due to the large amount of acute pain I am in right now.

Actually day before yesterday I was out a friends house about 2 hours away from where Iive and we spent the night, but I had forgotten to bring any kratom... so the morning after I got there I was at about an 8 on a 1-10 scale of pain and simply would not have been able to hang out any more without something for the pain, so I finally went down to the pharmacy and picked up a bottle of robitussin (somewhere around 450 mg DXM) and found that at this dose the pain was 90% gone- compared to 50-75% reduction with kratom/no tolerance! This is due to the difference in analgesics and anesthetics. The DXM is stopping the production of the pain signals themselves, rather than reducing the sensation of pain (correct me if I'm wrong about that Corpus or anyone). The drawback is that this dose is rather dissociative if you don't have any tolerance to NMDA-antagonists, and I was by no means all that functional as far as day to day activities are concerned. But if you don't have anything to do then it can be a good experience - going from lots of pain to just very minor discomfort (more like I simply still could tell that I have a broken metal rod in my spine) and having a very positive trip dealing with my fear of being crippled for life, the essence of life and death, and how each day must be cherished as the extremely special thing that it is, and helping me to "count my blessings" so to speak. I don't recommend doing this more than once every two weeks max, as I HAVE had a compulsive relationship with DXM and it isn't something I am ever going to be cultivating again. However, I feel have a matured lots since I was 15-16 (I hope jeez! ) and I realize now that I was getting very little out of my relationship with DXM back then, and that that period has actually skewed my perception of this compound; now I want to use this chemical very sparingly so that I still get the positive things that I did during this experience.


Oh my god I completely derailed this with my personal stuff but it's just my personal experience regarding my own chronic pain, drugs that help, and these new anti-abuse strategies... sometimes I think I seem really self-centered around here but I swear I'm just using my own personal experience to draw conclusions! Please forgive me!

of course, there are ways of separating the antagonists, but probably more trouble than it's worth.
there's always a loss in yield due to sample handling/transfer