"The state's medical examiners were asked to distinguish between the drugs being the 'cause' of death or merely 'present' in the body at the time of death," the study states. Because medical examiners often attribute cause of death to multiple drugs, a single death can result in two or three drugs earning "credit" for causing the death. The report provides this disclaimer about such double- and triple-counting: "Many of the deaths were found to have several drugs contributing to the death, thus the count of specific drugs listed is greater than the number of cases."
So when the Times reports that "benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium [diazepam] and Xanax [alprazolam], led to 743 deaths," it's lifting numbers directly from the report. But most of those deaths were actually polydrug deaths.
For instance, the report recorded 556 deaths caused by alprazolam and another drug (or other drugs) but just six deaths in which alprazolam was the only drug present and caused the fatality. Likewise, diazepam in combination with another drug (or other drugs) caused 171 deaths. By itself, it caused just three.
The pattern repeats for other popular pharmaceuticals used illicitly. Oxycodone (OxyContin): 664 deaths in combination, 41 alone. Hydrocodone (Vicodin): 251 deaths in combination, 13 alone. Propoxyphene (Darvon): 76 deaths in combination, nine alone.
The Times article also neglects to acknowledge that many of the deaths attributed to prescription drugs in the study were ruled suicides. Pages 34 and 35 of the study report that 19 percent of the alprazolam deaths and 21 percent of the diazepam deaths were suicides. For these individuals, the drugs were no more dangerous than the walkway along the Golden Gate Bridge. They chose to make the drugs deadly.
The Lesson? Pick your poison and stay true to it. No mixing and matching.
The Question: Do we need laws to protect us from ourselves?
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