In 1651, Thomas Hobbes declared life to be nasty, brutish, and short.
Since then, in nearly 400 years, the only real advancement we’ve had made things worse. Now, life is nasty, brutish, and long. Being alive on a daily basis sucks, and Hobbes’s solution to the problem, government, is making things even shittier today.
The feds are trying to take away one of the best avenues of escapism: mixing anti-anxiety medication with painkillers.
There’s nothing quite like it. Take a Percocet and a Xanax and you will not have a care in the world and you won’t be able to feel your body. Toss in a big glass of bourbon and it’s the closest you can come to pure bliss.
Now, the FDA wants you to know how dangerous you being happy for an evening is. They are requiring new warnings about the risks of mixing the two and telling doctors not to prescribe patients both.
From the FDA’s release on the news.
After an extensive review of the latest scientific evidence, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that it is requiring class-wide changes to drug labeling, including patient information, to help inform health care providers and patients of the serious risks associated with the combined use of certain opioid medications and a class of central nervous system (CNS) depressant drugs called benzodiazepines.
Among the changes, the FDA is requiring boxed warnings – the FDA’s strongest warning – and patient-focused Medication Guides for prescription opioid analgesics, opioid-containing cough products, and benzodiazepines – nearly 400 products in total – with information about the serious risks associated with using these medications at the same time. Risks include extreme sleepiness, respiratory depression, coma and death.
“It is nothing short of a public health crisis when you see a substantial increase of avoidable overdose and death related to two widely used drug classes being taken together,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, M.D. “We implore health care professionals to heed these new warnings and more carefully and thoroughly evaluate, on a patient-by-patient basis, whether the benefits of using opioids and benzodiazepines – or CNS depressants more generally – together outweigh these serious risks.”
You know what else will kill you? Day-to-day existence. At least let us have some fun while we trudge inexorably toward death.
(That said, the FDA is probably right and I am wrong, so don’t mix drugs on the advice of a blog you read. Listen to the responsible adults or something.)
[Via The Fix]