THE OVERDOSE, SOME MEDICAL STUPIDITY, AND
MITHRIDATES REX PONTICUS.
Renato COCCHI, a neurologist and a medical
psychologist.
Key words: Overdose, addictive drugs,
resistance, death, jailing, release, pardon, medical stupidity, addiction,
weaning, mithridatism, Mithridates.
Following the recent Italian pardon, from
the jails even ex addicts have gone out. Some of them wanted at once to resume
its previous drug, and died for the so called "overdose."
The "overdose" is a much ambiguous
term and it is understood, even from physicians and journalists, as dose
assumption able to do an excessive or deadly effect. For which - another
diffused stupidity - this "overdose" would have been one "badly
cut" dose. Right after a death of this type there is even a search by the
police of the pusher who is selling so "badly cut" drug, to impute
it.
Evidently the logic does defect, or the
common sense is lacking.
To have an excessive effect, such to provoke
an overdose death, the pusher does not use toxic substances. The bicarbonate or
other harmless white powders are the usual choice. We would have
"overdose" only if the drug rate, into the dose sold to the consumer,
were much higher than the usual. From which it follows that the pusher, so
doing, abdicates to a further profit and threatens to lose the customer. But
the pusher knows his business.
This full absurd explanation, has its origin
from the wrong idea that, anyhow, which is the variation of the cause, as
quantity in excess, which provokes the effect of "overdose." Nobody
seems to consider the decrease of the individual physical resistance. The ex
drug addict who came out of the prison as detoxified, has no more the
resistance that he had just before be jailed, but about that he had when he
started to take drugs. The opposite wants to mean to not know the phenomenon of
the habit and of the physical weaning.
When the first dose after the resignation of
the jail, corresponds for quantity to what the person used just before be
jailed, we will have exactly an "overdose." On the other hand, this
comes not from introduction of an excessive drug quantity because "badly
cut" (a stupid assertion even told by physicians), but from reduced
physical resistance. This phenomenon is a reversed mithridatism.
Mithridates (Mithridathes rex Ponticus),
from whom the name of this biological phenomenon, was increasing very slowly
the dose of the poisons he assumed voluntarily. So, he aimed to accustom (ie.
To addict) his own body to possible more powerful poisons, as one could give
him without Mithridates' knowing.
In drug addicts the habit is not however
voluntary.