How does a drug wear off from your body?
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Two main ways. First, it goes into your pee and gets flushed out.
Second, the liver processes many drugs as unwelcome chemicals and turns them into basic biologic chemicals like amino acids and sugars. This second one is why you can’t have grapefruit juice when on certain drugs. Grapefruit juice destroys an enzyme in your liver involved in deactivating many drugs and you end up risking an overdose. Ordinarily, this isn’t a problem unless you are taking one of these drugs.
A drug wears off from your body by going through your bloodstream and then to your liver. Your liver then breaks down the drug and gets rid of it in your urine.
Drugs get broken down mainly by two organs, the liver (dominant one) and some by the kidneys themselves. After being broken down into smaller less toxic (usually so, by design) constituents, the drug is eliminated by many different routes depending on the nature of the blocks it’s broken down into, such as urine, sweat, stool, saliva, etc.
2 main processes can be at work; excretion and metabolism.
Excretion means the substance is removed from the body unchanged in some way. For example, alcohol can travel to the lungs and be exhaled. This is the basis of the breath test.
Substances can also be changed to different ones through a variety of chemical processes. For example, the liver can convert alcohol into acetaldehyde, a completely different chemical.
These processes can be combined, or used standalone. So a drug can be changed into a different chemical, and then excreted through the urine, feces, etc.
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