How many milligrams of clonazepam would be lethal?

Answer 1

Recently I've been talking with my doctor (psychiatrist), and he said that a high dose of clonazepam could cause a cardiac arrest, and death too.

I've heard cases of overdose of medicines to sleep, and the two cases i know the persons didn't die; just went into a coma for some hours.

With mice, research has been done, and the lethal dose was 50 milligrams per kilo (50/1).

So, if you want to die and you are 65 pounds, you need to take 3250 milligrams. It is 1625 pills of clonazepam 2mg. It's impossible. Forget this. Your stomach won't hold that much.

We are not mice and maybe for us the lethal dose is even higher. I don't know.

A little more...This is an interesting question, and I think a little background is called for:

By the 1970's or so, sleeping pills (hypnotics/narcotics) were frequently of the barbituate family. And these were occasionally used as "Calmatives", anti-anxietals, etc. The barbituate family of drugs has some very dangerous side effects. Perhaps most notable are they're easily lethal in low dosages, synergize with alcohol so that the lethality increases dramatically, are wildly addictive (in the psychological and physiological sense), and the addiction requires hospitalization to break. Going off barbituates cold turkey frequently resulted in convulsions and was often fatal. But that was then... Nowadays, barbituates are very hard to obtain, either with a prescription or even on hte black market. They're hardly ever used in medicine at all anymore, although some uses remain current, mostly in in-patient anesthesia.

The drug family called benzodiazepines became popular soon after. Benzos aren't really sleeping aids per se, but they have properties in common with drugs like Ambien (zolpidem), and serve well as calmatives, antianxietals, tranquilizers, antiemetics and quite a few other things. Best of all, even in astronomical doses, they aren't particularly lethal. Clonazepam is of this family.

This isn't to say that you can't overdose on benzos;l just that it takes a LOT of them and lethal OD's are very rare indeed. Can they cause damage? Yes they can. Are they often deadly? No they aren't.