Autopsies show growing number of overdoses involving opioid alternative

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — While opioids, fentanyl, and heroin continue to kill people, North Carolina medical examiner records reveal another drug, one of the top prescribed medications in the country, is showing up in a growing number of fatal overdoses.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends gabapentin as a safer alternative to opioids, but research suggests the drug is contributing to the abuse epidemic. 

Originally created to help treat seizures and nerve pain, it’s now more widely prescribed and is showing up in more and more autopsies every year, according to state records.

Gabapentin isn’t linked to nearly as many deaths as opioids, but data from the North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office, provided at our request, show nearly 12 percent of the people who died from an overdose since 2013, tested positive for gabapentin. 

In fact, the number of poisoning deaths involving gabapentin more than doubled in recent years with 135 in 2013 and 294 in 2017, according to state records.

Because of the growing risk, a number of states, including neighboring Tennessee and Virginia, made gabapentin a reportable drug and now the North Carolina Department of Health wants this state to do the same. 

If passed, a recently filed bill would require pharmacies to start reporting gabapentin prescriptions.

“While gabapentin itself carries a low risk of overdose, taking them in combination with opioids greatly increase the risk of overdose,” NC Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Kelly Haight said. 

“The recently introduced Opioid Epidemic Response Act, if passed, would require pharmacies to report this information so that health care practitioners can look in the CSRS (Controlled Substances Reporting System) and see when their patients are receiving gabapentin from another prescriber. This would enable prescribers to avoid risky combinations of opioids and gabapentin,” Haight added.

When Robin Briggs hears the word “gabapentin”, she returns to a dark place. 

“I think death,” Briggs said. “I don’t want any more people to join my club.”

The widow first started sounding the alarm about the drug more than a decade ago after her husband’s death. 

Doug Briggs, a Charlotte-area physician, didn’t die from an overdose. Instead, he killed himself, but to this day, she’s convinced the gabapentin he took over several months made him do it.

“Once I realized it was the drug, I literally vomited from it,” she said.

In the years after his Christmas 2004 suicide, the drug label changed to warn of the rare side effect of suicidal ideation. A decade later, some research now warns of another kind of gabapentin danger involving an increased risk of abuse and death, especially when combined with other drugs. 

When mixed with opioids, gabapentin reportedly increases the high for people who misuse the drug, but research shows it also has deadly consequences.

“It’s heartbreaking for me, it’s truly heartbreaking,” Briggs said after learning 1,271 people have died from overdoses in North Carolina since 2013 with gabapentin in their systems.

It comes at a time when the country’s already in the midst of a drug epidemic. State records show Mecklenburg County is ground zero in North Carolina for that epidemic. 

More people died in Mecklenburg County from drug overdoses over the last five years than any other county in the state, according to medical examiner data. 

State records show poisoning deaths impacted nearly a thousand people in Mecklenburg County. Statewide, more than 10,000 people died since 2013 and more than 73 percent or 7,866 of them tested positive for prescription and/or illicit opioids in their system.

In addition to opioids, 2,962 poisoning deaths also involved Fentanyl and/or Fentanyl Analogues, while 2,325 poisoning deaths involved heroin, according to state data.

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