French prosecutors said Wednesday that Henri Paul had traces of two drugs in his blood along with a high alcohol level. A statement by the prosecutor's office said a blood test to determine the driver's alcohol level revealed the presence of two drugs: fluoxetine and tiapride.
TheCNN report said, "Fluoxetine is the generic name for the popular antidepressant drug Prozac while tiapride is a drug which works to calm the central nervous system. It is used for people with psychiatric disorders or to relieve the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal."
As more information is becoming available, we are beginning to get a better picture, although still not in complete focus, of the man they asked to drive Princess Diana away from the Ritz Hotel in Paris on that fateful night It is not a very pretty picture, as it continues to develop. Let's take a closer look at the blood content of Henri Paul.
This is from the official statement of French prosecutors, reported by Reuters:
- The analysis of a sample of blood taken on September 4, 1997, in the presence of an investigating magistrate yielded a level of pure alcohol of 1.75 grams per thousand grams.
- The analysis of fluid taken from the eyeball yielded a level of 1.73 grams per thousand.
- A search for toxic chemicals in the blood revealed therapeutic levels of a medication whose active ingredient is fluoxetine, and sub-therapeutic levels of a second drug whose active ingredient is tiapride.
Alcohol
The above results are from the third blood alcohol test conducted by authorities after Paul's family disputed the first results and got a French judge to order more tests.Obviously, this third test confirms the earlier ones: Paul was more than three times over the legal limit in France, and would have been deemed intoxicated in every country in the world.
An article pubished here on the Alcoholism site points out that someone with a BAC of .15 would be 380 times more likely to have an accident than a sober driver.
According to these studies, the likelihood of having an accident doubles with every .02 increase in BAC, so Henri Paul was more than 760 times more likely to have an accident than a non-drinking driver.
Prozac
A previous feature article on this site about alcohol and pain contained a long list of presciption and over-the-counter drugs which were not supposed to be combined with alcohol. Prozac was one of those drugs.But forgetting about the combination for a moment, let's look at the Prozac alone. According to Internet Mental Health "patients taking Prozac should be cautioned against driving an automobile or performing hazardous tasks until they are reasonably certain that treatment with fluoxetine does not affect them adversely."
But the combination of alcohol with any antidepressant is dangerous. According to Ronald J Diamond, M.D., of the University of Wisconsin Department of Psychiatry and Medical Director, Mental Health Center of Dane County, WI, "all antidepressants potentiate the effect of alcohol, and a few drinks will make a client on these medications more intoxicated than he or she would normally get. In addition, alcohol increases the lethality of antidepressants, and a normally non-lethal overdose may become lethal if combined with alcohol."
But perhaps even more startling is this warning from Dr. Diamond: "Antidepressant medications can trigger a manic episode in some susceptible people. In addition, some schizophrenic clients are reported to get more disorganized or more paranoid when taking antidepressants."
At this point, we do not know why Paul was taking Prozac, but generally it is prescribed for depression, panic attacks, and bipolar disorder, the condition formerly known as manic depression. It is also used in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Part Two: Tiapride: The Smoking Gun?
