Posted by notfred on October 1, 2006, at 23:32:43
In reply to Re: Anna Nicole's son's death..HOLD ON!, posted by Declan on October 1, 2006, at 22:14:30
> The amount of methadone in the system tells you nothing about the respiratory depressant effect. Similarly, I think, should methadone accumulate, that tells you little. Methadone is a med? Is there some AD vs All-the-fun-drugs(?) thing going on here. Some paradigm conflict ?
There is really no way to tell with what little info we have; the pathologist is the one that has more extensive info so I would go with his call on this.The LD50 is at least an order of magnitude different between a Methadone naive vs experienced
person. Methadone is the last choice as a street drug as other oipoids yield a more/stronger/better high. Methadone is highly controled in the US, in MM programs patients can only take it at the MM clinic under direct observation. This makes diversion hard. Heroin is easy to find in the US.
This suggests the kid was in a MM program and would be oipoid tolerant and knowlagable as to
Methadone's 24 hr half life; less likely to take too much w/i a 24 hr period, his LD50 would be high & he would be tolerant to respiratory depression.There is no easy way to tell if one is a slow metabolizer of any med. The pathologist may have direct knowledge of how much of each med was taken
so he would know if any one drug was taken in excess of the LD50.It is quite common for people to die taking far less that lethal doses of multiple meds, if they are a slow metabozizer of one, some or all the meds they took. The so called "classic presentation" that the pathologist mentioned.
This is why doc's do not start people on multiple meds at once if they can avoid it and introduce
a new med at a very low dose. That way toxic conditions present themselves slowly instead of killing the patient.
poster:notfred
thread:690014
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060927/msgs/691015.html