Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Drugs and Alcohol 1 -- Heath Ledger 0

Just a reminder -- mixing drugs and alcohol can kill you. And you don't need a tray of watermelon shots mixed with the nasty stuff cooked up by your friendly neighborhood dope peddler. A couple of beers and a pretty pink prescription pill from your smiling pharmacist can off you too. It doesn't take much.

A year ago a friend of mine started taking a prescription opiate to help stop the chronic diarrhea he suffered from a disease called amyloidosis. I guess opiates can make you constipated, which can be a good thing if you've got the runs all the time. But opiates also slow your breathing and he had severe sleep apnea, which means his breathing would STOP for a long period when he slept.  Guess whose breathing finally stopped for good in his sleep after starting the opiate?  I bet the doc who prescribed the opiate didn't know he had sleep apnea. What I wonder is why his sleep apnea doc didn't think he needed an alarm on his machine at home, since he set the alarm off all the time at the hospital?


So, I bet we'll find out that Heath Ledger died after a night of drinking followed by taking something to help him get to sleep, like Ambien or an anti anxiety drug. Instead of telling him he should never drink and combine those drugs, I bet the doc who prescribed them suggested not drinking "too much" before taking them.
 
Well, it sure won't happen again.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mixing alcohol and prescription drugs reminds me of the old adage about falling off a tall building:

It ain't the fall that kills you. It's the stop.

Anonymous said...

All the bottles say it too....today's day & age who doesn't know. He also was only sleeping 2 hours a night & lack of sleep can cause confusion, lack of memory and hallucinations...not to mention is related to hypertension, obesity, diabetes etc. He may have been forgetting when he took his last pills etc also. Self medicating with alcohol is always a problem also!

Anonymous said...

Those little stickers on the pill bottles are there for a reason.  
But who reads those??
Anna