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Drug Synergism _______________________________________________________
The synergistic effect of drugs is another important concept to understand. This is going to require that you go back to your friend’s house. When you get there he, offers you a beer, but this time he tells you to rate the high you get from one to ten with ten being the highest rating and one the lowest. However, he warns you that if you get a high of nine from the beer, you could overdose. You drink the beer and rate your high a three on the scale. A few days later, you go over to another friend’s house. This guy, your friend, is just like the rest of us, only more so. He asks you if you want to get high and when you say, “YES!” He gives you this little yellow pill called Valium, which is a minor tranquilizer. Like your first friend, he tells you that he wants you to rate your high from one to ten with ten being the highest rating and one the lowest. He also warns you that if you get a high of nine from the Valium you could overdose. After you take the Valium, you rate it a four on the scale. CRITICAL POINT: Drug synergism occurs when drugs can interact in ways that enhance or magnify one or more effects, or side effects, of those drugs. This is often seen with recreational drugs, for example when cannabis is laced with LSD, where the active chemicals in cannabis enhance the hallucinatory experience of LSD use. A few days later, you decide that you really want to get totaled. So, the first thing you do is go by your first friend’s house for a beer. After you drink the beer, you go straight to your other friend’s house for one of those little yellow pills. Your buddy gives you the Valium and you gobble it down like Rosanne Barr gobbles down a bag of chips. Now you have a high of what? If you are like most people, you will say seven…three plus four equals seven. Right! That is perfectly right except that alcohol and Valium are synergistic to each other. What this means is that if you take them together, they have a multiple effect, not an additive effect. In brief, you are going to have to multiple ∞ DRUGS…An Overview ∞ those ratings, not add them. When you do ____________________________________________________________ that, you end up with a high of twelve, not Inhalants: Breathable chemical vapors that are taken into the body seven…three times four is twelve. Do you by inhaling produce. know what that means? Not only are you going to overdose, most likely you are Legal drugs: Drugs that can be manufactured, distributed, and sold legally. going to be elevated to a higher level of existence. In a nutshell, there is a good Mainline: The injection of a drug into a vein. chance you are going to be checking out to Mainliner: A person who injects a drug directly into the vein. the Twilight Zone. Man: A term used to describe police officers; commonly used as This is exactly what happened to street jargon amongst drug dealers and users. Karen Quinlan. Quinlan is the poster-child OD: Slang term for overdose. for euthanasia. If you followed any of the Dr. Kevorkian’s cases, you probably heard
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