As promised, here is more info...
The first I actually even heard of it was this thread:
http://www.naabt.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3864
That got me looking a little more. I found the LDN web site (
http://www.ldninfo.org), and, while it contained a lot of interesting info about the drug, it didn't really help me in answering my questions. I think it was after reading this interview (
http://www.gazorpa.com/interview.html) with one of the big proponents of LDN that I started to feel there might be something there.
I saw this thread (
http://www.naabt.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=968) and, thinking about the above info, wondered if perhaps replacing "Sub 101" with "LDN 101", which had been shown to increase endorphin production, might be reasonable.
All of this was on top of the nastiness of
Suboxone chronic withdrawal symptoms...more than 30 days of runny nose, the runs, major lethargy, etc. I understood where the symptoms were coming from, but I was tired of waiting for my body to turn things back on.
As I mentioned earlier, the compulsiveness of my pre-narcotic addictions was really starting to scare me. I read this (
http://www.gazorpa.com/History.html), and the part on how Naltrexone reduced relapse in alcoholics by 50% jumped out on me. I'd been doing a lot of thinking on the causes of relapse at that point, since I was past the acute withdrawal symptoms, but then felt more need to go back on something than I had during the worst of the acute phase.
Mentally, things started to click. I had self-medicated to create endorphins for years, to the point that it became compulsive. The time that I had freedom from the compulsiveness was when I was majorly enhancing my own endorphin production (with fake "endorphins). When I stopped doing that, the compulsiveness came back with a vengeance. Here is a drug that can significantly increase natural endorphin production, with very few side effects (mostly some sleep disturbance for the first couple of weeks).
Since I was already feeling like ******************** from the suboxone detox, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I'm still not sleeping well, anyway, so there's no disturbance. If it works, I'm gaining the benefits of the fake endorphins, but with my own natural ones. If it doesn't, it is non-addictive and can be stopped immediately with no adverse effects. And, because the relative doses are so small, it is really cheap, too (like $40 for 3 months).
I would love to see more studies of LDN on PAWS management, but I couldn't find much specific. The problem is Naltrexone is a post-patent drug, so even if it is a miracle drug, no pharma company is going to pay for the studies. That means slow-going. However, I'm more than willing to try to be another anecdote in the sea of Internet users who may have tried something.