Imm not into drugs and I’m not really interested in that topic but I always wondered how drugs can kill someone. Obv I know that the organs shut down and everything but why are they shutting down specifically?
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Well it really depends on the drug and what’s happening.
To be very basic, things like depressants (alcohol, heroin, fentanyl,etc.) usually cause your breathing and heart rate to get so low to the point where you eventually stop breathing, hence why people with alcohol poisoning or heroin overdose start to turn blue.
Stimulants (cocaine, crack, meth) can cause your heart rate to increase to the point that causes cardiac arrest, it can also cause things like seizures and high fever which can damage organs.
Opiates cause respiratory depression. In other words, they slow your rate of breathing. You develop a condition called respiratory acidosis. The person who overdosed is not getting enough oxygen and is retaining too much carbon dioxide. Our bodies cannot live without enough oxygen. Crucial organs start shutting down.
All drugs/ meds have a specific “therapeutic range” that sets dosage in relation to effect. It goes from the minimum dosage for an effect to occur up to the dosage where unwanted or adverse reactions start to show up. This “window” can be very narrow for some high potency substances with serious side effects, like respiratory depression (e.g. opioides) or cardiac events (e.g. digitoxin), especially when these substances have high interaction potential with metabolic enzymes (e.g. cytochrome induction/inhibition) or synergistic physiological effects (e.g. alcohol + benzo + opioid = extreme GABA overstimulation paired with central respiratory depression, that leads to the brain “ignoring” the breathing reflex). There is no substance without side-effect, because they always “fit” in more than one receptor in the body. Some are just more obvious than others. That’s why some drugs are under strict supervision and others can be bought without a prescription. But you can OD with Aspirin as well if you really want to.
ELI5 edit: all drugs have unwanted effects. In some cases side-effects can interfere with vital body functions, especially in regard to applied dosage.
Nobody has really touched on how overdoses effect the liver, so I’ll try. When you consume certain substances like alcohol or analgesics (pain killers) they are metabolised inside your liver and changed into forms that are easier for your body to use and that are also non-toxic. This process can also create substances that are harmful in large quantities. When you overdose on alcohol, otherwise known as alcohol poisoning, you liver is overwhelmed by the amount of alcohol and tries it’s very best to process it but the substances end up in your blood because your liver cannot keep up, this damages organs.
You can technically overdose on anything your body uses, this includes the sun, water and oxygen. Whilst it’s incredibly hard to naturally achieve this, ways that we artificially expose ourselves to these things like sun beds, oxygen tanks and diuretics can cause overdose.
A lot of it depends on how the drug affects the central nervous system. “Downers,” which have a relaxing effect, accomplish this by slowing down the nervous system, which in turn not only slows down the brain, but everything else as well. If it slows things down too much, they eventually just stop. Stimulants, or “uppers,” speed everything up, and can eventually get to the point where things start breaking.
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