Accidental?? Did he think they were Altoids?
When a person takes a bunch of drugs and an opiod is one of them, it’s not the drug’s fault.
“When a person takes a bunch of drugs and an opiod is one of them, it’s not the drug’s fault.”
I don’t know how he died, but it might not be due to taking a bunch of drugs at the same time.
My wife almost died of an opioid overdose ... she wasn’t a junkie. People assume she was hearing this story, but I can assure you she isn’t. She was prescribed vicodin for pain. She was taking tylenol for pain on top of that (very bad back pain).
The length of time she was taking the crap did get out of hand, I’ll concede that, but she was nowhere near what you’d call a junkie (I hate to sound so defensive, but I want to emphasize that I am not in denial :-) ).
Anyway, she was acting strange and fell very ill. I took her to the ER. They noticed her kidney functions were a bit off and wanted to keep her for monitoring. About two days later, her liver started failing. She was about 8 hours away from total liver failure and they rushed her to the ICU. I’ve never been so terrified in my life ... and I’ve been terrified before.
To make a long story short, she miraculously survived w/o a liver transplant. Her kidneys fully recovered as did her liver (no damage to the basal cells). It was a combination of the vicodin and the acetaminophen that caused the overdose. About three years later, she gave birth to my son :-).
I’m not one of those reformed idiots that preach about opioid use and how they’re evil. We all know what they can do when abused or used improperly. My wife will tell you it was her fault.
Don’t rush to judgement when you hear about these opioid overdoses, please :-). In a significant number of instances, the people who succumb to these drugs didn’t realize they were killing themselves ... they were using a bad mixture of prescription and OTC drugs. I guess I’d place my bets on illegal opioids since that’s a majority of these cases (i.e. the crap that’s infecting the USA from south of the border), but there is also a chance the kid may have been taking a prescription medication that led to his death.
I am not going to jump ugly on you about the chemical basis for opioid addiction. Clearly, you are either not interested in hearing that or you just don’t understand the chemical process in the brain.
That said, if for no other reason you want to get rid of of the extra expenses attached to your local, state, and federal tax for the costs of fighting this epidemic.
And I do not mean the cost for treatment. I mean the basic cost of sending an ambulance and paramedic to the scene. Figure the cost of sending a life support transport staffed by at least one certified Paramedic, the cost to the community is about $200-$500 a trip. In most decent sized towns that is three or four trips a shift.
My city of about 30,000 people is spending nearly half a million dollars a year to go out and pick these people off the ground.
If for no other reason to get ahold of this problem, it is the fact that we are spending tens of billions of dollars a year.