Should You Mix Alcohol with Xanax?

Xanax is a central nervous system depressant, and alcohol is a metabolic depressant. Taken together, these two depressants enhance each other’s effects to potentially dangerous levels. Because of this, physicians always want their patients not to mix Xanax and alcohol. Regrettably, these warnings are frequently honored in the breach, with potentially dangerous side effects for those individuals who ignore them.

Should You Mix Alcohol with Xanax?

An individual who combines Xanax and alcohol will very likely experience severely impaired brain functioning. Effects include memory impairment and loss of consciousness, drowsiness, and loss of coordination. Alcohol abusers who ignore warnings not to drink and drive are placing themselves and everyone else who is on the road with them at an extreme risk of injuries and fatalities due to accidents. The combination of Xanax and alcohol can be fatal by itself even if you do not attempt to drive after mixing them. Alcohol depresses your respiratory and heart rates. Xanax further depresses those metabolic functions. Large doses of both can depress a person’s metabolism to the point of unsustainability and death.In certain cases, Alcohol can enhance the symptoms that Xanax is intended to treat. For example, people who take Xanax to control panic attacks can experience a heightened sense of panic when they begin to lose coordination or experience impairments in memory or cognition. Alcohol can transform a mild panic attack into an uncontrollable sense of agitation that requires emergency medical care.Anecdotal reports from people who have used alcohol and Xanax simultaneously suggest that Xanax creates a substantially lower threshold for inebriation, even when the user has developed a tolerance to alcohol over time. A person who would otherwise experience a milder sense of intoxication after five or six drinks might get blackout drunk on the same amount of alcohol when Xanax is added to the mix. Hospital emergency room reports reveal that people who combine Xanax and alcohol might have no memory of how they injured themselves or of violent encounters that put them in the emergency room in the first instance. Perhaps one of the more insidious effects of combining alcohol and Xanax is that the disorder that Xanax is intended to treat is shuffled into the background while a second, more dangerous disorder, namely, alcoholism begins to develop. Individuals with psychological disorders can be more prone to drug addiction and alcoholism. The combined effect of Xanax and alcohol can reduce a person’s natural sense of self-preservation that would otherwise help them to control their intake of abused substances. As an addiction deepens, that person will require separate rehab therapy in addition to more intense counseling to address the original disorder.

Xanax is a very useful and effective drug when used properly, but mixing alcohol and Xanax is never a proper use. If you have developed a habit of using both Xanax and Alcohol at the same time and you need advice on breaking that habit, please call the Last Resort Recovery Center near Austin, Texas, at 512-360-3600. We will provide a confidential consultation and make recommendations for treatment programs that can prevent more serious problems if that habit were to continue.