FDA Heightens Warning About Drug Combinations

[question everything]

Source: WSJ

The Food and Drug Administration, concerned about death and overdose risks from narcotic painkillers taken with certain antianxiety or sedative drugs, issued its most serious safety warning about the drug combinations.

The so-called boxed warning about combined use will be required on labels for opioid painkillers like oxycodone, hydrocodone and morphine, and for benzodiazepine drugs. These are widely sold as generics, with names like alprazolam and diazepam, and under brand names like Xanax.

In all, 389 drugs are covered by the heightened warnings. FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said that during his recent visits to Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, he saw that “benzodiazepines and opioids were an emerging threat in emergency rooms” and elsewhere. Dr. Califf called on doctors to “please heed these warnings” and to make them known in drug information given to patients.

The National Center for Health Statistics estimated that benzodiazepines were involved in 31% of the opioid-painkiller deaths in 2011, up from 13% in 1999. In 2011, the government agency said, the number of deaths related to opioid painkillers reached nearly 17,000.


Read more: http://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-heightens-warning-about-drug-combinations-1472680199

[TygrBright]

1. Opioids + Benzos + Alcohol = Lethal

We do not keep good enough records on OD deaths to know with precision how often this "triple threat" cocktail has killed, but I would not be surprised to find it implicated in more than half of the annual OD death toll.

These substances' respiratory and circulatory depressant effects potentiate each other.

There's a good deal of attention being paid right now to fentanyl- and carfentanyl-laced heroin overdose deaths (as there should be!) but those are not nearly the ongoing drumbeat of lethality that the triple threat has been, is, and will continue to be.

somberly,
Bright

[Dreamweaver 5.0]

2. Viagra+cocaine=Goldbond

[Tobin S.]

3. I recently lost a friend to a similar concoction.

He was addicted to Xanax and heroin and would often mix the two. It ended up killing him.

[question everything]

4. How sad. My condolences to you

Sadly, even if we know what people are doing, often there is nothing that we can do to stop this destruction.

[Tobin S.]

5. That's what makes it especially horrible.

He overdosed twice before his death. The last time I talked to him he was on his way to a drug dealer's house. I told him that he was in trouble. He thought I was talking about with the cops from when he overdosed. He said he was in the clear. I told he that, no, I was talking about his life. He seemed to think he had everything under control. He was dead a month later. There was nothing I or anyone who knew him could do.

[PatSeg]

6. Here is another link for the story

Couldn't read it at Wall Street Journal because I don't subscribe.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/08/31/492110114/fda-boosts-warning-on-danger-of-combining-opioids-and-anxiety-meds

[question everything]

7. Thank you. I was looking for another source but seems that I missed this one (nt)

[PatSeg]

8. You're welcome

I was really interested, as I have been prescribed some of these drugs in combination in the past. Fortunately I was very leery about taking them.

[cstanleytech]

9. I'm surprised that they need a warning to be honest.

Before my mother died 2 years ago she was on both medications and I never let her mix her Xanax with her morphine pills and gave her the choice of one or the other.