The drug is an anti-diarrheal medication
http://www.your4state.com/news/news/officials-identify-new-cause-of-drug-overdose-death
A Winchester man is dead and another from Clarke County is in critical care after they overdosed on similar over-the-counter medications.
Officials said they overdosed on an anti-diarrheal drug called loperamide.
“Traditionally, we see people overdosing on substances such as heroin, so this brings a whole other angle to our addiction crisis in our area,” said Lauren Cummings, executive director of the Northern Shenandoah Valley Substance Abuse Coalition.
The region’s addiction epidemic killed 29 people in 2015 from overdoses on illegal or abused drugs. Although, loperamide isn’t smoked, injected, prescribed or even bought from a dealer.
Loperamide is the active ingredient in anti-diarrheals like Imodium and can be purchased wherever over-the-counter drugs are sold.
While a loperamide overdose has only caused one death in Virginia since 2007, the region’s poison control center reported that doctors called 6 times in 2015 for people who overdosed on loperamide.
According to Dr. Nicolas Restrepo, vice president of medical affairs at Winchester Medical Center, there are two possible reason why most medical professionals believe loperamide is being abused.
“One is to, unfortunately, get an opioid-like high and the other is to do a ‘do it yourself’ type of approach to withdrawing from opioids, in particular, heroin,” he said.
“The concern that we have is that, folks, instead of finding help with their addiction, the disease of addiction, and their struggle with substance abuse, are instead self medicating,” Cummings added.
Many doctors believe that the “self-medicators” are turning to the internet for information on loperamide.
“Much of that information is either A, not accurate, or, B, accurate enough, but without warnings associated with risks of taking such massive overdoses,” said Dr.Charles Devine, health director for the Lord Fairfax district of the Virginia Department of Health.
According to Devine, those risks are extensive.
“Unfortunately, taken at such huge doses, the loperamide causes a significant amount of cardiac toxicity, and this can lead to fainting spells or simply dropping dead,” he said.
Officials urge those struggling with addiction to seek professional help in person and not to rely on information found on the internet.
Filed under: General Problems
Thank You so much for tearing this claim apart and putting it back together with wisdom and Frankness.
I know if this is not true and Your statement and research proves this,,as far as I’m concerned,, gives me and all on here one less thing to worry about.
I Appreciate and Trust Your outlook so will not worry about this one..Paula
I read Dr. Devine’s statement, “Unfortunately, taken at such huge doses, the loperamide causes a significant amount of cardiac toxicity, and this can lead to fainting spells or simply dropping dead.” Now while it’s been almost a quarter century since I graduated from pharmacy school, I could not recall any cardiac toxicology related to loperamide. I went to my handy resources, Lexi-Comp and Clinical Pharmacology and looked for any references to cardiac toxicity from loperamide. I did not find anything with the exception of one small note in Lexi-Comp that stated that some formulations contain benzyl alcohol and that particular excipient might cause some cardiac related toxicities. I looking over the ingredient lists for all products currently sold in the United States, I could not find any OTC products that contained benzyl alcohol. As a side note, benzyl alcohol related cardiac toxicity is usually this toxicity is associated with problems in neonates and infants.
So I have to wonder how the good Doctor arrived at this conclusion. As I’m pressed for time, I’m not able to do a comprehensive, on-line literature search. It is possible that this is the case where one is ingesting shovels-full kinds of quantities of loperamide, but that would be a relatively rare situation. Most of the time, especially with the mandated post-market surveillance, these kinds of rare adverse effects would surface, especially for a drug that was FDA approved forty years ago (and OTC for over 20 years as I recall). When one considers that there have to had been at least a few documented cases of iatrogenic reactions (of this type) in the general population for a drug that is a ubiquitous and long lived a loperamide, it is surprising that those kinds of things should have made at least a passing mention in the hand held databases that most providers carry on their person, e.g., Lexi-Comp and Clinical Pharmacology. One other thought. As long as loperamide has been available and most easily so as an unmonitored OTC (as opposed to something like dextromethorphan or pseudo-ephedrine), the addicts would have long ago determined any abuse potential for it. They are an ingenious bunch of folks, if nothing else.
Now I’m not calling Dr. Devine a liar or a deliberate misrepresenter of the facts. As I said, I have not had the time to go mining for some obscure, documented case or three. It just seems strange that at the height of this current opioidophobic episode, that another bogey man gets trotted out to scare people. Of course, if one is addicted to opioids and wants to get treatment, the DIY route is the least preferred. I fully understand one wanting to keep something like this that is so stigmatized out of any sort of permanent records, especially one’s own medical history. But I just don’t see this getting brought up as a public safety issue now for any reasons that would appear, at least superficially, legitimate. If anyone out there is aware of any documentation as to any causal, relationship related cardiac toxicities and abuse of loperamide, I’d be most grateful if the links to such articles or studies would be shared here.