Showing posts with label sharing drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sharing drugs. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Medication sharing can result in death

I grabbed this from Dr. Richard Keller, our Lake County Coroner ~
IMO - a need to know for passers by!

…roughly 23 percent reported loaning their prescription medications to someone else, and 27 percent reported borrowing prescription medications.

The medications most frequently shared (loaned or borrowed) were allergy drugs like Allegra (25 percent), followed by pain medications like Darvocet and OxyContin (22 percent); and antibiotics like amoxicillin (21 percent).

Seven percent of those interviewed said they shared mood-altering drugs like Paxil, Zoloft, Ritalin and Valium.
This certainly seems to agree with what we see in our cases of death due to licit drug intoxication or overdose, although certainly our death cases are more heavily weighted toward pain meds and “mood-alerting drugs”. This is a huge problem. People really don’t realize the danger in sharing, trading, and taking someone else’s meds. Just because they come from a drug store doesn’t mean they are always safe.