And now for something positive…
Reacting to the nation’s opioid epidemic, doctors in the United States are co-prescribing fewer opioid painkillers and benzodiazepines such as Ativan and Xanax, federal health officials report. When these drugs are taken together, the odds of an overdose, even a fatal overdose, increase sharply.
Taking opioids and benzodiazepines together can lead to drastically slowed breathing, which ups the likelihood of an overdose. Between 1999 and 2017, the percentage of overdose deaths from the combined classes of drugs increased from 9% to 21%. By 2017, benzodiazepines were implicated in a full third of opioid overdose deaths, the researchers noted.