And the bad news about Ambien continues. This year, a report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the agency within the HSUS dedicated to the behavioral health of the nation, found Ambien-related emergency department visits almost doubled from 2009 to 2010 from just four years earlier. Ambien, whose active ingredient, zolpidem, is also found in Ambien CR, Edluar and Zolpimist was responsible for 42,274 visits says the government, sometimes in conjunction with other drugs and alcohol. Almost half of zolpidem-related ED visits resulted in hospital admission or transfer to another facility and a quarter resulted in intensive care treatment in the ICU.
Seeking a Good Night's Sleep
Americans have always loved their sleeping pills. In the late 1960s, Jacqueline Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls about the addiction of beautiful people to "dolls" or barbiturates was made into a blockbuster movie by the same name starring Sharon Tate, Barbara Parkins and Patty Duke. In the movie, Sharon Tate commits suicide on sleeping pills, an eerie foreshadowing of her death the following year by the Manson gang. Marilyn Monroe's death was also attributed to barbiturates.
When Dalmane and Halcion debuted in the next decades, they were thought to be safer than "dolls" but were they? Dalmane, the first drug in the benzodiazepine (Valium, Xanax) family to be explicitly approved for sleep was launched by Hoffmann-La Roche in 1970. But by 2001, government officials with the National Transportation Safety Board at FDA hearings said the drug was likely to "increase the risk of an injurious accident more than five times normal," foreshadowing the Ambien problems to come and eroding the drug's popularity.
Nipping at Dalmane's heals was Halcion, another benzodiazepine which was introduced in 1982 and believed to be safer. It became the world's best-selling sleep aid. Like Ambien, Halcion was popular with business travelers fighting jet lag and fatigue on trips and craving a good night's sleep for mental sharpness.
Except the drug was rapidly seen to do the opposite. It began to be linked to amnesia, panic and emotional upheavals. Both authors William Styron, in his 1990 memoir, "Darkness Visible," and Philip Roth, in his book "Operation Shylock," cited nightmare-like experiences that occurred from taking Halcion. In 1991, Upjohn, the drug's manufacturer, settled a lawsuit from a woman who shot and killed her 82-year-old mother, claiming the drug was responsible. So much for being safer than barbiturates. The drug was banned in England.
Are Alternative Sleeping Pills Safer?
To both drug makers and those afflicted with insomnia, the barbiturate/Dalmane/Halcion/Ambien sagas reveal two overarching truths: there is a huge market/need for insomnia drugs and the drugs have fallen woefully short when it comes to dangerous side effects. In fact, thanks to Ambien, new sleeping drug candidates are now assessed on the basis of "next-day driving tests," a welcome but probably tardy development. Alternative sleeping drugs to Ambien such as Lunesta, Sonata, and Rozerem have serious drawbacks and side effects in the opinion of patients who have taken them and posted reviews on Askapatient.com. None receives a high rating.
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