[AGBert]

Please spare the drug addiction lecture, thanks...I'm confused about the Oxycodone/Oxycontin dosage. My friend has a prescription for 80 mg Oxycontin pills, and another prescription for 5 mg Oxycodone pills. Aren't these medications the same? And why is the mg amount SO different - if 5 mg is enough to have some sort of effect, wouldn't 80 mg be deadly?Thanks.

[Megan S]

You can acquire a tolerance to that drug. I've seen people receive as much as 160mg at a time.

[John de Witt]

Yes, 80 mg might be deadly if it were all in the system at once. And druggies do purposely defeat the time-release aspect. But OxyContin is normally taken twice a day, and is timed-release. 80 mg twice a day averages out to about the equivalent of 20 mg every three hours, a substantial dose of the regular-release formulation, and not for the narcotic-naive, but within the average range for people with chronic pain who've built up some tolerance.