After the Xanax Wears Off…

Many personal stories of people struggling with an addiction that they were never told could happen punctuate an article about indiscriminate benzodiazepine prescribing in Oregon’s The Bulletin. “You take it for a while and it works, and you think you’ve got this miracle going on and then it stops working,” Carol Brainerd tells The Bulletin. “So the doctor ups it and ups it, and that’s where a lot of us get into trouble.” Ann Metcalf says, “The Xanax wears off after four hours. I would wake up even more panicked than when I went to bed.”

Benzodiazepines treat anxiety, cause long-term problems (The Bulletin, June 1, 2014)