The story of a wayward anesthesia trainee who took a near fatal dose of fentanyl hit the news this week. Of particular interest is that he overdosed (and lived) just hours after a nurse in the same large university medical center hospital overdosed and died from a combination of fentanyl and midazolam The tragic coincidence points out the problem unique to health care workers: easy access to feel-good, rapidly and intensely addictive drugs, as well as the clean needles and syringes to inject them. The situation is not at all rare. I have known two anesthesiologists who died young after inadvertently overdosing on similar drugs to which they were secretly addicted
