The results are in: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died from acute mixed drug intoxication. He had combined heroin with benzodiazepines. That combination did him in.
It wasn’t a “heroin overdose” as such.
Indeed, according to Jacob Sullum writing at reason.com,
Drug combinations like this are typical of deaths attributed to heroin or other narcotics. Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) indicate that “multi-drug deaths” accounted for most fatalities involving opiates or opioids in 2010: 72 percent in suburban New York, 83 percent in Los Angeles, and 56 percent in Chicago, for example. Back in the early 1990s, the share of heroin-related deaths reported by DAWN that involved other drugs was even higher, 90 percent or more.
We hear about “overdoses” of illegal drugs for the simple reason that this plays into the hands of those who run the War on Drugs. It’s an inconvenient truth, for them, that the most deadly problem with most narcotics (illegal or prescription-legal) is with what other drugs (illegal or prescription-legal or over-the-counter) they interact.
One might argue that drug warriors, by focusing on targeted illegal drugs, are killing Americans by distracting us from the biggest danger, mixing drugs.
This over-focus on a hated thing to the detriment of good diagnosis is not limited to pharmacology.
Consider economic policy. I know many people who blame the 2008 financial implosion (as well as its lingering effects, even) entirely on the 1990s (bipartisan) repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. They focus on one bit of deregulation. Other enforced regulations leading to the debacle, not to mention Federal Reserve inflationism, housing market subsidies, anti-discrimination programs, and a whole mortgage after-market created by government creatures, Fannie and Freddie?
Blankout.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Autopsy Myopia”
Jacob,
I enjoy almost all of your columns, but this one I find especially fine. However, I want to mention another way the War on Drugs contributes to overdose deaths: It results the use of impure drugs whose concentrations of active ingredients are unknown, rendering lethal overdoses likely. Moreover, it decouples the drug purchases from timely antidote purchases. It is as if the drug warriors want these deaths to continue in order mendaciously to prop up the idea that prohibition itself is desirable.
The problems of mixing drugs (medications) is not just in the ‘getting high’ side either – I nearly died in August from un-controlable bleeding, caused by the blood thinner prescribed by the surgeon, and again in January when the blood pressure medication caused sever water retention and my lungs filled up.
Let’s get government all the way out of this area.
I oppose the War on Drugs, but I don’t see how it relates to this situation. Mixing any opiate with a tranquilizer or barbiturate is likely to cause death. Mixing a barbiturate with alcohol was a common method of committing suicide in the 1960s, when barbiturate prescriptions were common.
The problem of legal drug mixing is handled by clinicians and pharmacists who look at possible adverse drug-drug interactions. Considering the number of patients on multiple drugs, the process works well.
2 Comments. 1. i fail to see the connection between drug usage, etc and the financial collapse, CRA, etc.
2. I know a few doctors WHO TREAT CHILDREN, whose parents use drugs (including pot). Unanimously (admittedly, a small sample) have said that the children have been affected. (Especially when used during pregnancy).
Drug use is not harmless.
My view