A 36-year-old man took about 100 sedatives after a marital dispute, got into a car, and when the drug took effect, he hit two signs and two parked cars. The incident happened in Kapuvár last fall, and the Győr-Moson-Sopron County Prosecutor’s Office on Monday filed charges against the man, who not only survived the accident, but also the drug overdose.
The answers sent to Telex by the prosecutor’s office also revealed that the man was found in a dazed but not unconscious state. The well-known sedative alprazolam was prescribed by the doctor to relieve tension a few days earlier, but at the time of the accident, the police found the hundred-piece jar empty in the car, and the man later estimated the amount taken at around eighty.
Still, how can you drive a car with such a large amount of sedatives (at least for a while) and survive it all at all?
Gábor Zacher also participated in some similar criminal cases as a forensic medical expert, but he says that as a toxicologist he encountered thousands of cases in hospitals during his decades-long career. In Hungary, sleeping pills and tranquilizers top the list of suicide attempts. “In Péterfy or the Honvéd, it was not uncommon for us to treat several people a day who wanted to end their lives by taking a large amount of sedatives. Fortunately, only a very small percentage of them succeeded:
cases with a fatal outcome can be measured in thousandths at most”
– explains Zacher and adds: these drugs are not the “big predators of toxicology”.
Most self-harm with medication is therefore committed with one of the three known alprazolam- or clonazepam-based anti-anxiety drugs in Hungary, and although it is possible to die from consuming them above a certain amount, this is much less likely than popular belief suggests. The specialist emphasizes that
if their active ingredient is not in itself, their side effects can be fatal.
“Even if these are not the most dangerous drugs, it is definitely worth handling them carefully. If, for example, someone falls on the bed after taking a handful of sedatives, then starts to vomit in a semi-conscious state, and then breathes the vomit into his lungs, then he suffocates. Or if his limp tongue slips back, he will also suffocate. But even if the person does not die, he may suffer permanent damage, for example, if he experiences respiratory depression as a result of the drug, and permanent brain damage due to the lack of oxygen.”
Of course, it doesn’t matter what kind of pills someone takes. The treating physician decides on the medication dosage and chooses from the packages containing 0.5 mg, 1 mg and 2 mg of the active ingredient, and according to Gábor Zacher, specialists usually do not recommend more than 2 mg 3 times a day. Rather, the problem is caused by the fact that with these drugs – as with alcohol –
psychological and physical habituation may develop, and with it a higher level of tolerance to drugs.
“For a drug addict who increases his daily sedative dose to, say, ten or more tablets, i.e. 20-25 mg per day, his body can cope with even multiples of this amount. Just as I have seen an alcoholic patient who communicated fluently with a blood alcohol level of 3-3.5 per thousand (this corresponds to the state of alcohol poisoning), but also a young person who had to be put on a ventilator with a blood alcohol level of 1.5 per thousand. The same is true for the active ingredients of these medicines:
it is not possible to determine in general how much of them the human body tolerates.”
In Hungary, there are currently more than 200,000 people addicted to tranquilizers and sleeping pills, and the statistics have also been worsened by the Covid epidemic: according to the toxicologist, domestic consumption increased by half a million cans in one year during the quarantine period. And although all three anxiolytics in question require a prescription, that is, at least a family doctor is required to prescribe them, they are also easily available in larger quantities through internet commerce.
According to Gábor Zacher, it is therefore likely that when the man who had an accident in Kapuvár did not take the therapeutic dose of the sedative, his body was able to tolerate the large amount of it because he was already used to regular doses of the drug.
The man was charged with the offense of driving while intoxicated by the public prosecutor’s office, and he can be sentenced to up to two years in prison.
