Word: drugged
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Researchers who are familiar with the drug were just as stunned. "No one would ever take this to sleep. No one would ever take this drug for insomnia," says Paul E. Wischmeyer, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Colorado, who co-authored a major 2007 study on propofol abuse. "Never, ever. It would be like using a shotgun to kill a small mouse...
...substance. "Anyone can throw on a pair of scrubs if they know what they are looking for, walk into an operating room, and walk away with this stuff, and it's unlikely to be noticed," says Wischmeyer. With one self-administered dose lasting for a five-minute high, the drug offers a quick escape, then a quick disappearance from the bloodstream. "For professionals, it's easy to get and difficult to detect," says Wischmeyer. "You can use this drug and be back at work and no one will even know you were using...
Wischmeyer says the potent drug has benefits in the operating room but poses major risks for abusers. "In the right hands, the drug is the most effective, safest anesthetic that many of us use," says Wischmeyer. "In the wrong hands, it's a very lethal drug." (See TIME's video "A Musical Appreciation of Michael Jackson...
Wischmeyer saw this firsthand as a medical resident in 1999, when a fellow student was found dead from a propofol overdose, the syringe still stuck in his arm. Since then he's followed cases of professionals, and a handful of non-professionals, who have abused the drug. Even the professionals he has studied have high mortality rates with the drug, with a third of the abusers dying from it. The small pool of non-professionals fare worse. "I've never found a non-medical person abusing this drug that has ever lived," says Wischmeyer. Propofol's potency leaves very little...
...Paul H. Earley, medical director at Atlanta's Talbott Recovery Campus, equates abusing the drug to playing Russian roulette. "There is a very narrow window to go from feeling euphoric to be being unconscious to being unconscious and not breathing," says Earley. In a closely monitored operating theater, doctors can make quick adjustments to avoid problems. Abusers have no such recourse for a drug that acts so quickly that they often injure themselves immediately by falling. Earley says that a center that specializes in drug abuse among medical professionals started to see early signs of propofol abuse five years...