The year long thing after going to treatment is an outlyer. I don't think they understand it but it is called Post Acute Meth Withdrawal Syndrome. PAWS. I think meth is a much more powerful drug with worse side effects than scripts but I don't know that for sure.

My normal pattern with meth was say to snort a few lines before work on a Monday morning. With meth it only takes a very small amount to keep you going all day but like a bunch of dummies we would end up snorting a bunch of it all day and all week. The energy, the high, the production I could achieve was amazing. I watched this process happen with myself and about five other guys at work. Over a long period we got to the point where we were spun out and it only made our work product worse. It seemed to effect me more. I would get psychosis and a lot of the symptoms you hear about tweekers having.

To answer your question directly I was able to go a long time with only using during the week and then sleep almost non stop all weekend and eat tons of sugar so by monday morning I was good to start over. I also adapted to it so that I could actually sleep at night and eat dinner.

So I would say three or four days to get the dopamine levels back to a point where I could function ok. When I say two weeks that is what it took to get back to feeling my normal real self. I wasn't crashed out and sleeping that whole time. I think you could get over the major withdrawals in 72 hours with lots of sleep and try to eat as healthy as possible and not just sugar. I didn't realize it was prescribed for eating disorders. You would have to do the best you could as far as eating to recover. Basically amphetamines deplete your brain of dopamine over the run and it takes awhile of sleeping to recover. Sleep is the ultimate healer in these cases.

I am not sure if you are a medical professional or not but if you are there are programs for medical professionals that protect your job. My brother who is a pharmacist and who was addicted to opiates he was stealing from work got into such a program that saved his license and luckily is job. Jobs and homes are much less important than your well being in my opinion. There is a way if you are willing. I don't think any of us can do this alone.