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>> Everyone knows that mixing alcohol
and drugs together are dangerous.
Most of the people that you've read about in the news
who have died of overdoses have died of a combination of alcohol
and a variety of different drugs.
What's been harder to figure out is just how dangerous is it
to mix alcohol and drugs?
There's been an interesting study that tried
to look at that question.
And what they did is they compared people who died
from an alcohol overdose alone to those people who died
from a combination of alcohol and drugs
and here's what they found.
People who died of alcohol overdoses alone had an average
blood alcohol level of .33.
And just to put that in context, the legal limit
for driving in Colorado is .08.
So, a .33 is quite high.
What was very disturbing was that they found that people
who died of a combination of alcohol
and other drugs had an alcohol level that was only .155.
So, it was half the amount of alcohol that was needed
to die with alcohol alone.
To put those blood alcohol levels in perspective,
an average say 140 pound person would probably have
to drink 4-5 drinks to get to a blood alcohol level of .15
and someone of 180 pounds would probably have to about 7 drinks
to get to the same level.
So, these findings are very disturbing
and things are probably worse now than this study suggests,
because the drugs they used
in that particular study were relatively benign compared
to a lot of the drugs that people combine with alcohol now.
For example, this study did not include Oxycontin or Vicodin,
drugs that are even more likely to interfere breathing,
especially in combination with alcohol.