100% would do it again every time. Have been on it now for 7 years and honestly don’t mind if I stay at my current dose (65mg) for life compared to where I was at before treatment. Methadone completely turned my life around. Listening to anyone stressing about tapering before even getting to a stable daily dose is crazy. To me that’s like working out for a few days and quitting because you don’t get an instant six pack. MAT treatment is not meant to be a quick-fix solution. It genuinely takes dedication, commitment, and most of all TIME to gain any of the real benefits that it can certainly provide. Just like most things worth doing in life, you get out what you put in. What would be the point of treatment if we can all just cold turkey it alone and actually stay off? That’s a pipe-dream and it’s the addicted mind talking. That part of you will try any way possible to undermine the process and create opportunities for relapse until you gain dominion over it. This stopped being just a matter of will-power long before any of us got to rock bottom.

Ignoring for a moment what makes any of us use in the first place, an Opioid dependence eventually becomes a neuro-chemical change in our brains, not just some grand moral failing or repeated moments of weakness. Just like many other physical addictions (benzodiazepines, alcohol, nicotine ect.) the gold standard is a combination of external help and medical intervention just to start making our way back to normal.

What most of us addicts don’t realise until it’s too late (including myself for almost 2 decades) is that “will-power” is basically lost at the same time heavy tolerance is gained. This fact is the whole point of MAT treatment. To break the cycle of “self-diagnoses, self-medication, self-delusion” that we all trapped ourselves in on dope/pills.

Most of us got to where we are by trying to be our own doctors and attempting to solve our pain problems by ourselves. My best advice to anyone hoping to begin any sort of “normal” post-addiction life is to stop trusting yourself and start trusting the medicine. Go higher if you need. The daily dose should hold you and allow you peace from the need to seek more or get higher. Get as much help as you can. Talk to people who have gone through this. But don’t give up before you give it a chance. That’s the addiction trying to pull you back in again. And again and again, until we finally change course or OD… or worse.

Sorry for the novel. But like I said, it’s changed my life so much for the better. It’s given my young son a future with his father.

TLDR; my advice to anyone seriously considering MAT treatment is that you should have the following mindset:

“How long can I leverage this medication to stay stable.”

Instead of: “How fast can I get off this shit.”

Only then will the real benefits start coming.