I got here 16m too late.
Dr. Howard Kornfeld… was called by Prince representatives
When your employees are calling the doctor, the damage is done. If Prince himself had sought help, we would probably still have him.
I’m sorry to hear that he was living with such a horrible addiction.
I’m still wondering if he died of acetaminophen/paracetamol poisoning. The pills were said to be percoset.
If you take too many vicodin or percocet, your death will be reported as “opioid overdose”. However, these pills typically contain 10mg or more of acetaminophen for every 1mg of opiate ingredients. So, for example, if you were taking commonplace 5/500 vicodin, you’d have to take eight pills to get to the 4g (4000mg) acetaminophen toxicity threshold, but at that point you’d only have taken 40mg of hydrocodone, which is not life-threatening.
And modern flu medicines often contain acetaminphen, too. If you take enough vicodin to need narcan, you’ll be well on your way to an agonizing death from acetaminophen poisoning. If you take flu medicine on top of that… nobody can save you.
[quote]Six days before Prince was found dead, his private plane was returning to Minneapolis after two concerts in Atlanta when it made an emergency landing in Moline, Ill. Sources with direct knowledge of the investigation have said that the landing occurred because Prince was overdosing on opioids.
Prince’s bodyguard carried him to waiting paramedics at the airport and he was given a shot of the opioid antidote Narcan. [/quote]
Guess treatment isn’t confidential if you die before you get treatment.
It’s unbelievable how close Prince came to receiving the buprenorphine from Dr. Kornfeld and confidential residential treatment. Opioid addiction is awful.
I’m thinking the leak about Recovery Without Walls being called in didn’t come from Recovery Without Walls.
Bill Mauzy, the Kornfelds’ lawyer mentioned (and quoted) in the piece, is a big name for criminal defense in Minneapolis. About 95% of the time he feels it necessary to talk to the press, it’s because the police talked to the press first.
Percocet contains 325 mg paracemetol mixed with 2.5mg, 5 mg, 7.5 mg or 10 mg of oxycodone.
The total daily dose of acetaminophen should not exceed 4 grams (12 pills)
OK, thanks. So, people in this thread and this one are talking about people working themselves up to taking 300-400mg of oxycodone daily, and still being able to function and perform useful work.
So if we say, some random purple person took the percocets with the lowest possible proportion of acetaminophen, 300mg would be 30 pills, which would be 9.7g of acetaminophen - a lethal dose, even without any alcohol or flu medicine involved.
This makes me think that if the reports are right, and Prince OD’d on percocet, it wasn’t the opiate that killed him.
Vicodin works the same way. The paracetamol’s in there so that you’ll die if you take a dose that would offend drug warriors.
In the context of post surgical pain, a combination of paracetamol and oxycodone is more effective than oxycodone alone, Oxycodone has side effects, best avoided.
Now, it may be that this substantial body of literature is irrelevant to chronic pain management, but blithely ignoring post surgical care will earn you no favors.
I don’t mean to ignore the beneficial effects of NSAIDS; but there are valid and humane uses for arsenic, digitalis, strychnine, and curare, too. Using pills with high toxicity should not be the first resort.
Do you have an agenda?
Oh, hell, yeah. I thought that was clear!
Remember, when you see the CDC reporting that over 165,000 persons died from overdose related to opioid pain medication in the United States between 1999 and 2014, their category of “overdose related to opioid pain medication” specifically includes a large group of medications that kill through the mechanism of paracetmol poisoning. The use of the term “opioid” causes people to think these numbers reflect opiate overdose, engendering moral panic and widespread misunderstanding of what’s really going on.
We are in the middle of an epidemic of acetaminophen poisoning and we’re failing to even recognize it - in fact the actions that are being recommended to and required of physicians are making it worse. We’ve gone from a situation where some people became dependent on legally controlled, fairly safe opiates, to one where unsafe opioid medicines are killing people who had a history of handling opiates without addiction, to the current situation where people are increasingly resorting to heroin due to inability to get safe pain meds.
Currently paracetamol toxicity is one of the most common causes of poisoning worldwide. In the United States and the United Kingdom it is the most common cause of acute liver failure. And this is based on numbers that probably reflect far less than a third of the actual cases, since anything that also includes opiates is categorized opioid overdose rather than what it really is - tylenol poisoning.
I think the odds that Prince died of acetaminophen poisoning are extremely high, personally, although I doubt his next of kin are being informed of that possibility. If he died because he abused drugs, that’s on him, right? Nobody can blame the medical establishment who gave him addictive substances adulterated with drugs that have a low lethal dose… two things that really don’t make sense being put in the same pill.
And this is based on numbers that probably reflect far less than a third of the actual cases, since anything that also includes opiates is categorized opioid overdose rather than what it really is - tylenol poisoning.
Yeah, but methadone and heroin don’t contain Acetaminophen.
We used the SuperMICAR text entries to study the 7,817 poisoning deaths that occurred among Washington State residents between 2003 and 2010. We tabulated the drugs named on death certificates and computed age-adjusted and age-specific death rates for the top-named drugs and for prescription and illicit drugs. Methadone was named on 2,149 death certificates and was the most frequently named substance, followed by alcohol, opiate, cocaine, oxycodone, and methamphetamine
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/179/7/884.short
Further defense of the proposition that “people really aren’t that cynical” will have to wait until I visit a library. Getting a lot of paywalls.
Thank you for that link! I take it methadone is easily obtained in Washington state?
But the fact that people are dying of other causes, too, doesn’t change the raw fact that our medical/industrial complex is killing people with acetaminophen.
When it is desirable for a patient to receive a combination of drugs, physicians routinely prescribe multiple pills. My father at one point was taking 14 pills at a time (and he benefitted from it). There’s no medical justification for prescribing large quantities of drugs with a high toxicity combined with small quantities of addictive drugs in the same pill, and it violates the principle of minimizing harm. So why is it considered so important to do so when it’s not medically necessary, and so obviously harmful?
Ah, found something of a smoking gun…
Deep inside this article.
While oxycodone/acetaminophen combination drugs are in Schedule II, the other opioid/acetaminophen combination products are in Schedule III (hydrocodone and codeine), Schedule IV (propoxyphene) or not scheduled (tramadol). Prescription orders for Schedule III and IV drugs can be called in, and a maximum of five refills is allowed within 6 months from the date of issue. In contrast, a physician must write a prescription for Schedule II drugs except in emergencies, and no refills are allowed. Therefore, if patients are prescribed opioids in Schedule II, rather than the Schedule III or IV or unscheduled opioid/acetaminophen combination drugs, prescribers may be more burdened. A decrease in Schedule III medications may make it difficult for providers to issue prescriptions and thus impact access to medication. Patients may be burdened as well because insurance providers may only pay for a 30-day supply of the medication. This would result in more frequent clinic visits. Given the cost of an outpatient visit from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, this could result in more than $700 per patient per year just to prescribe this type of medication.
However, Percocet is already on Schedule II, so the acetaminophen provides scant benefit to doctors and patients who would prefer the non-medical benefits of using a Schedule III pharmaceutical. Schedule III and below generally requires that the opiods be mixed with active nonnarcotic ingredients
Hmm.
That is significant…
Vicodin and all other hydrocodone combination pills became Schedule II controlled substances in the USA on 2014-10-06, invigorating heroin trafficking and enriching privatized prison operators.
