Mixing Alcohol and Codeine
- Alcohol also called
- booze, beer, wine, liquor, ethanol, etoh
- Codeine also called
- lean, purple drank, co-codamol, dihydrocodeine
Dangerous
The lean pairing, and the reason it kills people who thought they were being moderate. Codeine's conversion to morphine varies enormously between people — ultrarapid CYP2D6 metabolisers, roughly 1-2% of Europeans and up to 28% in some North African populations, produce metabolite levels as much as 45 times higher than poor metabolisers from an identical dose. You do not know which you are until it matters. Alcohol adds its own respiratory depression to a dose whose real strength is unknowable, and cough syrup formulations make it easy to drink far more than intended.
The risk here is to the body — breathing, heart, temperature or organs. Set limits before you start, because this kind of harm does not announce itself in time to react.
Can you mix Alcohol and Codeine?
High risk of death or life-changing injury. Do not combine.
- Codeine
- Weak, but metabolised unpredictably between people
- Codeine Intoxication Associated with Ultrarapid CYP2D6 Metabolism. NEJM. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa041888
- Codeine Therapy and CYP2D6 Genotype. Medical Genetics Summaries, NCBI. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100662/
Checking more than two?
Combinations of three or more carry risks that no pair-by-pair chart can show. The checker rates every pair at once and flags the whole-mix ones on top.
Open this in the checkerRelated combinations
All combinations →Rated dangerous. Educational information only, not medical advice. Absence of a documented interaction is not evidence of safety.