LEGAL DRUGS THE MOST FREQUENT KILLERS, STUDY FINDS

You gotta love bureaucrats. They write interesting reports but then
give them names that'll put a three-year-old on a sugar high to sleep.
Case in point, I am perusing the Florida Medical Examiners Commission
2008 Interim Report of Drugs Identified in Deceased Persons. Hey, it's
actually not a bad heading for a report as far as these things go, but
imagine the National Enquirer writing the heading. How about "Florida
Docs Find Killer Drugs In Dead Bodies."

All right, enough with the bureaucrat bashing already, although it is
fun, isn't it? Assuming that the Florida numbers will hold throughout
North America, the news in this report is not good. The examiners did
an analysis of 168,000 autopsies performed in the state in 2007 and,
lo and behold, a goodly number of those autopsies revealed drugs in
the decedents (or dead people for the rest of us). Most people dying
with a drug in their system had been consuming ethyl alcohol - in
other words, they where drunk and went and did something stupid, as
drunks are wont to do, but in most of these cases it was not the drug
itself that did the killing. The drug that did most of the killing,
i.e. it actually caused the death of someone, is heroin, which was
found to be the cause of death in 91.5 per cent of its users. The
other 8.5 per cent of people found dead with heroin in their systems
would have been knifed in a drug deal gone bad, hit over the head for
their stash or died of dirty-needle-induced HIV/AIDS - you know, just
the ordinary everyday causes of death.

Looking at these numbers as percentages, the next killers would be
methadone, which killed 75 per cent of its users, and Oxycodone, which
killed 60 per cent and yes, bells should start to ring in your head by
now because those are legal drugs available by prescription.

As a matter of fact, putting aside alcohol for the moment that fully
73 per cent of all drug occurrences found in the study involved
prescription drugs, it gets even worse when you consider those
instances where a drug was the actual cause of death. In fully 78 per
cent of the cases of death caused by drugs, those drugs were legal,
prescription drugs.

So here we have a legal system running amok spending billions, jailing
thousands while keeping the populace afraid of the druggies and the
dealers and other lowlifes who are waiting around every corner looking
for a chance to hook their kids.

In the meantime, those same kids are popping dad's Percodan or mom's
Diazepam, which they found in the medicine cabinet, like candies. In
the Florida study, Oxycodone (of which Percodan is only one
incarnation) killed 423 people outright, while the Benzodiazepines
took care of 392 more.

Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. You'll know Diazepam
better as Valium, made famous by the Rolling Stones as a Mother's
Little Helper. If this legal drug holocaust has been going on at least
since the '60s, maybe it's time to start rethinking the War on Drugs.