Complications

A friend of mine who traveled a really crappy road with me 20 years ago is now taking 90 milligrams of methadone a day. He had worked his way down to 15 milligrams a couple of years ago but was kicked out of his methadone clinic because he had a legitimate prescription for benzos. For whatever reason he increased his dosage back to 90. He has been as high as 120-130s. We had first planned to try and transition him to kratom, but the other night he told me that he had plenty of methadone now. He doesn't mind being on methadone, living in the projects, drinking every day, etc. I don't think there is any hope for him to ever recover at this point. He never went to rehab, while I spent a year in treatment and halfway houses almost 2 decades ago. Sometimes he acts like he has true emotional insight into his problems, and at other times it's like he has absolutely no *#@%! idea what's going to happen to him fairly soon, or where he really is in life. He's going to develop varices in his throat and colon and bleed out of every orifice. His mother is about to die from alcoholism and he will be left with nothing but his brother who has threatened to kill him if it just so happens that he turns out to be a robot.

Everyone I grew up with seems like an idiot to me sometimes. I used to have a large heart. I also used to pretend that everyone died a long time ago. In a sense they did. Everything we really cared about is a joke now. A nightmare of a clown drinking dark liquid that turns into gold tinged prayers inside him, and on his lips for brief moments. Prayers for everyone in the world. He mostly just sits there thanking anyone that buys him a drink or drinks with him, but sometimes he'll get up and start talking about how he likes the little girls he knew in high school. He looks like a kid, and much older than his actual age at the same time. The idealism never gets a chance to age like a fine wine. It's consumed as soon as possible and fed into a cage of memory. It was just yesterday when everything happened.

I'm as cold and distant from myself as the dust on Mars. He told me that he didn't want me to get too involved with kratom. When I have done the research, recommended this forum to him, bought him samples when he was considering asking someone he met on the street to get him a kilo from Indonesia, and am still successful at an extremely hard job that requires a master's degree and am actually doing better than I ever have. He thinks I know absolutely nothing because I'm not on the street anymore, and I'm angry that he never tried to get clean. He didn't come with me, and he will most likely never get better.

He was never in physical pain while I've been in pain all of my life. He asked me if I was smoking enough weed. While I wish I could smoke marijuana on a regular basis and still function, I cannot work while intoxicated on it, and it doesn't relieve the pain. Sometimes it makes me stretch for hours because it increases it. I can't remember what it was like to be where he is, and no one but my wife knows how hard I've had to work, how much I've had to forget, to build a new life. In a lot of ways it sucks because I don't really feel like I know who I was before I got clean anymore. I used to remember, but after going through medical treatments and almost dying from liver and kidney failure I am a different person.

Anyway. I hope that he does not, in fact, turn out to be a robot. How low of a dose of methadone does someone have to be on to transition to kratom?