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Can you overdose on methadone?
Yes. All opiates share the liability that they depress the parts of the
brain that control consciousness and respiration. If you take too much
methadone, you become sleepy, and can lose consciousness.
Ultimately the person becomes comatose, stops breathing and dies.
Persons who are taking large amounts of heroin, or opium or morphine
or methadone develop tolerance (see above)to these effects and are at
less risk than persons who are naive to opiates
.
I've heard that methadone is bad for your liver. Is that true?
Absolutely not. There is no evidence that methadone in any way
damages the liver. Many patients who are taking methadone have
inflammation of the liver due to Hepatitis C infection. If methadone
were bad for the liver we would have certainly seen evidence of that
from the hundreds of methadone clinics around the world that are
providing daily doses.

Do people have to stay on methadone for the rest of their lives?
Some do. As we discussed above, when patients want to stop taking
methadone, they must be slowly tapered or they will have severe
withdrawal symptoms which may cause them either to ask for their
methadone dose to be increased, or worse, they will relapse to heroin
use. There are people who are able to go through the taper and leave
the program, which is encouraged by all responsible programs. These
people are in the minority. Far more frequent is the experience that
people attempt to taper and reach a point where they can no longer
continue to lower the dose without enduring withdrawal symptoms
and/or craving for heroin, their worst nightmare. They must then face
the difficult decision that they may have to take methadone for the rest
of their lives or risk relapse.

In a way, the situation is similar to that of a person with diabetes who
has to take insulin for the rest of his life, or the person with
hypertension who must take beta blockers for the rest of his life. These
problems share common characteristics. They are chronic diseases
that cannot really be cured. Persons with such diseases can, however,
take medications to control the disease process. Other examples