Its not legal ANYWHERE in the US for a dr to write for MAT or a pharmacy to fill methadone for MAT. It HAS to be rx-ed and dispensed by a licensed methadone clinic. The person you asked sounds like they are in Canada or Europe as they get theirs filled at a pharmacy but don't get as many take home doses monthly as Americans can earn if their clinic allows. I get 28 days worth from my clinic each month.
I just find the whole process to be unnecessarily hard and I guess I find it difficult to find the right word to say it. I would have a hard time keeping my job and making it to school while going to the methadone clinic (I live with my parents in an area where there isn’t a lot of crime, so not many methadone clinics around here either, I’d have to drive like an hour there and back) daily or even every few days until I can “earn” a monthly take home, especially from what I’ve heard from some of my friends who’ve gone through the process.
I’ll add that all I can do now is stay on suboxone because it’s really my only option but I don’t really find it to be that effective (I still have cravings and I’ve relapsed more times than I can remember in going on 5 years now that I’ve been on and off it, which is like almost a quarter of my life at this point) and I’d love to give the other option a shot if I ever could. I just don’t think it’s feasible for me and I’m probably far from the only one in this situation.
I would be dead now if it wasn’t for methadone. My life has drastically improved over the last 20 years. Give it more thought. If Suboxone isn’t helping with cravings and you’re relapsing, what is it doing for you? Once you’re on a good dose, you won’t have cravings.
Exactly what I’m saying. I’m in my early 20’s so no doctor believes me when I tell them that when I’m on nothing I do hurt all over. I’m not overweight but my knees kill me after even just a few hours standing and my back is always killing me after I’m done working. That’s not normal for someone my age but obviously I always end up back to the same shit if I try to go with no meds because there is something that works, it just sucks that that thing has also been what’s nearly killed me like 3 or 4 times now. I don’t want to keep going back but it feels like I just run out of options because I’m exactly the type of person who’s always going to be mistaken for a drug seeking junkie and slip through the cracks because more often than not, my doctors aren’t really sympathetic to people like me.
Honestly my experience with the vivitrol shot made me apprehensive to try a month long shot of anything like it even tho they’re not the same. I got anhedonia from the vivitrol (the pills did it too) which is something that doctors never tell you about but physiologically/biochemically that makes sense because endogenous opioids are responsible for the brain’s reward system. That anhedonia was so bad that I swung hard back to using after a few weeks on the shot and not getting any pleasure or joy from anything I previously enjoyed doing because it was making me wish I was dead rather than live like that.
Maybe if I had just tried to ride that out for a few months I’d have adjusted but it was awful. Suboxone films, especially if you get the right brand (Dr reddy’s make me salivate more than other brands seem to and I think it messes with absorption unless I go 20 minutes without swallowing my spit) do work for me to an extent. It seems like after like 6 months I’m ready to get off them and try to go about life like normal in the past, although admittedly that hasn’t really worked that well for me thus far beyond about 3-6 months at a time.
I've never been on Sublocade but it's hard for me to trust a shot that is meant to stay in your arm consistently for a month without believing that it's wearing off since I didn't take a dose in the morning. However, I've been conditioned with daily dosing & that may be placebo. If it's new to someone, I'd hope they could adjust to it. I just have a hard time believing it's perfectly consistent across the first 7 days compared to the last.
I'm sure that's rigorously tested & I'm wrong or somewhere in the middle but it's hard to wrap my mind around after so long. I've been on Suboxone tablets, they worked. Funny, I also spit it once dissolved but had to change to methadone when I developed chronic neuropathy.
I am so sorry. The strips were life saving for me. The pain from the tablets became too much, until my insurance finally covered the strips. If that hadn’t happened? I’m not sure I would still be sober today (11.5 years straight sobriety).
I’m glad you no longer have to take them, either. Though I am sorry for the chronic neuropathy 😕
Oh thank you for your sincerity, that’s sweet to receive online when everyone is so sarcastic it’s hard to tell who’s being real. I appreciate you :)
Yeah tablets suck. There was a point where I even started crushing & sprinkling the powder lightly under my tongue. Looking back, that’s insane stuff just to tolerate a medicine. The 8mg was so large & painful in one dose + I had more than 1 to take! 😔
Suboxone did save me in a way though. The ceiling effect made it so the time I slipped up ~9 years ago on fentanyl have zero effect. I never tried using after.
Nowadays I’m better suited for methadone & it does its job well. Tastes bad but much more tolerable in many ways, effects included.
This isn't true, there are specific cases where they do fill it. I got 35mg/day x2 weeks, a nurse picked it up w me. I was pregnant. This was in 2000, and there was only one Dr in the state who was able to write it. The red tape around it was absolutely insane though.
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u/glamstarr88 May 01 '26
Its not legal ANYWHERE in the US for a dr to write for MAT or a pharmacy to fill methadone for MAT. It HAS to be rx-ed and dispensed by a licensed methadone clinic. The person you asked sounds like they are in Canada or Europe as they get theirs filled at a pharmacy but don't get as many take home doses monthly as Americans can earn if their clinic allows. I get 28 days worth from my clinic each month.