Methadone Blocking Effects

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's John Bosworth. I'm a licensed mental health counselor in St. Pete, Florida. I'd like to speak about methadone blocking effects and what is meant by methadone as a blocking effect or a blocking agent. Methadone came about probably in the 1930s, 1940s as a really, really cheap painkiller. It's synthetically derived. Same kind of class of drugs as morphine and heroin, and what we found through using it with cancer patients or people in chronic pain is that it actually provided the same type of relief by binding to the opioid receptors in the brain. And most people, when they hear of methadone, they think of somebody on heroin and that's, you know, trying to get off heroin but then they become addicted to methadone. Well, that's very accurate because methadone is still highly addictive, but one of the effects of the blocking...the blocking effect of it is that it lasts a lot longer and the withdrawal symptoms coming off methadone are a lot less intense than they would be heroin, so that's why it's used as a maintenance drug. But there's basically two reasons or two major effects that come about as a blocking agent. And the first one is that if somebody takes methadone on a...on a...on a daily basis, the effects of the methadone stay in the system for 24 up to 36 hours in some people. So if they're addicted to heroin and they shoot up or take heroin, the heroin literally does not produce the high that it does as if they weren't on the maintenance methadone. So what happens there from an addiction perspective is you've got...you've got somebody that's literally taking their heroin, but they don't get the same effect or the same euphoric high, but the opioid receptor's blocked so they don't have that continually craving for it. So the addiction process is starting to get broken at that point right there. And then a second effect is because it's longer lasting, the withdrawal symptoms tend to be a lot milder, so even if they get addicted to methadone, although some people say it's still pretty unpleasant getting off, it doesn't seem to be as...the withdrawal symptoms don't seem to be as intense as they are with the actually heroin withdrawal if somebody was getting off heroin or other opioids without the methadone maintenance. The blocking effects basically just allow for somebody to not...we'll recap, to not feel the high, and also have milder withdrawal effects when they...when they're coming off heroin or another opiate. My name's John Bosworth, and I'm talking about methadone blocking effects."