Alcohol & Combination Barbiturates: Deadly

When a man who has had a few drinks and a moderate dose of barbiturates before going to bed is found seriously ill next morning, doctors have a hard time deciding just what his trou- ble is, and an even harder time treating him. If he is dead, the coroner has difficulty deciding between accident and suicide. Medical researchers are still debating whether the effects of alcohol and barbiturates*are multiplied or simply added together. But now, in a report to the American Chemical Society, a biochemist and a physician suggest an explanation for the alky-pheno combo's deadly powers.

Biochemist Jack E. Wallace and Physician Elmer V. Dahl could not do their research on human beings, so they took the body enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase and studied it in the test tube. Normally, this enzyme breaks down alcohol in the body to acetaldehyde, which another enzyme in turn breaks down to acetic acid. In their experiments at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the researchers learned that barbiturates hinder the first breakdown process and leave a lot of alcohol in the system. And alcohol has a severe depressing effect on some primitive nerves, including the vital center that regulates breathing. While different barbiturates showed varying degrees of interference, all upset the normal metabolic process to some extent.

The researchers have preliminary evidence that what happens in the test tube also happens in rats. Drugged animals simply cannot metabolize alcohol. Presumably drugged humans face the same problem. Thus an ordinary sedative dose of a barbiturate may combine with an ordinary intoxicating amount of liquor to leave behind a lethal dose of nerve-depressant alcohol.

*Some say "bar-bit-yourates" and others "barbi-tyoo-rates"; both are right according to medical and lay dictionaries. How the drug family got its name is also a fielder's choice. Some say that German Chemist Adolf Baeyer named barbiturates for St. Barbara, on whose day in 1862 he first extracted the drug in pure form. But medical historians think it was named for a waitress in Munich who contributed urine samples for the research. Others say it was a waitress named Barbara all right, and Baeyer got the samples easily because she was his mistress.

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