Drinking Beer After Stopping Methadone Recently

[Matwee803]

Hey I've been on methadone for 3 months. I've decrease mg for the past 2 months down to 2 mg 3 days ago. Today is the first day with out taking it. Is it safe for me to drink beer?

 

[Tommyboy]

I moved your post into its own thread in the appropriate forum.

I think that you should avoid alcohol after stopping methadone. For one thing, drinking while in opioid withdrawal is not going to be good. Another reason is that you will be very susceptible to trading one addiction for another. A lot of people find themselves having drinking problems when they are not taking opioids anymore.

Considering the half-life of methadone, you should wait another day if you really wish to drink, but I don't recommend picking up beer now.

 

[whippa craka]

^Totally agreed.

Alcohol is not the solution. You may feel good for the first 30-60 minutes after a drink but soon after that everything will get a whole lot worse. Constipation for one thing; and you will feel a whole lot more shitty. That's just the acute physiological effects. Considering your so close to being off of Methadone your really better off doing whatever you can to stay away from any kind of CNS depressant, you will appreciate it much more in the long run. It only helps start the cycle back up again. Your better off watching the game, smoking some bud (that's just me...) or whatever else you like to do in your free time. Your almost there, good luck

 

[Swimmingdancer]

I would definitely NOT drink any alcohol when you've just stopped methadone. But not because I believe that the fact that you took 2mg methadone yesterday is going to put you at increased risk for overdose though - I don't personally think the risk in that regard should be significantly higher than if you drank the same amount of beer after the methadone was completely out of your system, it's just 2mg taken by someone who has been on methadone for months and whose tolerance was presumably much higher. Of course one should always err on the side of caution since we're all different and if you are going to drink be very careful with how much you are drinking and drink very slowly, especially if you haven't had alcohol for a long time.

My main reason for suggesting avoiding alcohol is because it could easily make you feel miserable. Alcohol makes methadone leave your system faster, and speeds up and intensifies withdrawal symptoms. I also found that tapering methadone has made me way more sensitive to negative side effects of alcohol, hangovers, etc. Whenever I drink I totally regret it as it makes me feel like crap.

The second reason is that as others said, I would avoid alcohol for quite a while since you are very vulnerable right now and it could be easy to pick up an alcohol addiction.

The third reason is that it could put you at increased risk for relapse: if you drink, then feel awful or feel the withdrawals more severely, it could really make you want to take some of your old drug of choice to feel better. Our decision making processes are impaired when under the influence of alcohol as well.

 

[cook]

We don't even know what amount of beer are we talking about. And beer is still beer, not vodka. Couple beers should not be a problem but it might stimulate your opioid addiction (?) making you more vulnerable to relapse.