Why is alcohol withdrawal more deadly in comparison to “harder” drugs like heroin?
In: Biology
So generally speaking, when people use drugs for a longer period of time, the body adjusts accordingly. For example, if you use heroin for a long time, you become less sensitive to normal doses of opioids and as such you wont get as high from the same dose as you previously did.
In the case of alcohol, it tends to bind kind of everywhere, and your body gets used to the numbing effects of alcohol over time, so it reacts accordingly, by increasing the amount of some neurotransmitters, decreasing the amount of others, and increasing or decreasing the sensitivity of various receptors that these neurotransmitters can bind to.
Alcohol withdrawal is particularly dangerous because some of these neurotransmitter and receptor systems that have been either upregulated or downregulated during alcohol addiction are responsible for controlling how actively your neurons work in general. When you suddenly stop taking alcohol, your body is still used to the state of having alcohol, and can not adjust quickly enough, so now it is off balance regarding its neurotransmitters and receptors. Following that and being without the numbing effects of alcohol, during alcohol withdrawal, your central nervous system can become hyperexcited, which leads to tremors, difficulty controlling your body, arrythmias, changes in the level of consciousness, sometimes hallucinations, and potentially death, typically due to serious arrythmias or breathing depression due to e.g. seizures. Your whole central nervous system is, quite literally, firing much too fast, and when you were regularly drinking alcohol, it had to, to be able to overcome some of the effects of alcohol.
This serious form of central neural network hyperexcitement when it has resulted from alcohol withdrawal is called delirium tremens, and alcohol withdrawal doesn’t automatically lead to it.
When people do die of opioid withdrawal, rarer as it might be compared to alcohol withdrawal, it’s typically for a similar reason; the overexcitement of the autonomous system. Alcohol however just gets distributed very easily kind of everywhere in your body due to its chemical properties, and it binds to more receptors than opioids do, so the withdrawal, in the extreme case, tends to often also have more symptoms and potentially more serious symptoms.
Latest Answers