Deadly cocktail

ALCOHOL depresses the nervous system so when mixed with other depressant drugs, it can shut the body down completely.

The potency of both drugs and alcohol is also increased when taken together.

That is a view shared by Dr Chris Luke, consultant in emergency medicine at Cork University Hospital.

“Drink and drugs are — like malaria and measles — distinctive but equally deadly in their effects. And a combination of the two is infinitely more dangerous than the constituent parts,” he said recently, commenting on the growing level of violence associated with drugs and alcohol.

He estimated that two-thirds of his workload is drug or alcohol related and that heroin use has risen dramatically in Cork in the last decade.

According to University of Rochester Health Services in the US, each person is different and the result of mixing alcohol and drugs is unpredictable. Chronic use or intermittent use of drugs and alcohol will lead to liver damage, gastric ulcers, dangerous rise in blood pressure, memory problems, stroke, coma or sudden death.

The heroin high is characterised by the depression of the central nervous system. In an overdose, breathing stops. Because alcohol is also a depressant, it is dangerous to drink alcohol while using heroin, as the compounded effect of depressing the central nervous system can lead to an overdose.

Using alcohol with other depressants and drugs compounds the depression of the central nervous system and can be fatal. These include heroin, morphine, opium, and barbiturates.

Toxicology tests on the bodies of John Foley and John O’Donoghue have been carried out at Cork University Hospital, where full post-mortems were also conducted.

Early results suggest that both men had taken a combination of a number of depressants immediately prior to their deaths, including alcohol, heroin, methadone and Xanax, a drug used to treat anxiety.