In her blog on USC Annenberg’s Reporting on Health, journalist Martha Rosenberg reviews some of the quantitative evidence and qualitatively bizarre anecdotal evidence of the dangers of “waking blackouts” that not uncommonly occur under the influence of sleep aids like Ambien, Restoril, Lunesta, Sonata, Dalmane, Halcion and various other benzodiazepines.
“Under the influence of Ambien, people say they have sexted married friends, drawn penises in the middle of their handwriting, ordered expensive and unwanted items online and one person ‘tried to legally change my name on the computer,’ reports Rosenberg. “One woman I interviewed drank an entire bottle of black shoe polish under the influence of Ambien.”
Rosenberg discusses last year’s FDA recommendation to reduce the standard night-time dose of various sleep medications due to frequent instances of “next-morning impairment.” She also recounts that, “In 2012, in San Antonio, Julie Ann Bronson, a 42-year-old flight attendant was tried for running over a mother and her two daughters while ‘sleep driving’ and her life was ‘ruined’ by Ambien, says her lawyer. In 2006, a 36-year-old lawyer from Andover, Massachusetts, was sleep-driving on Ambien when he struck and killed a man who was changing a tire alongside his wife and young son, according to Marie Claire magazine. Two years later, a 56-year-old woman also sleep-driving while on Ambien killed a mother of 11 children.”
According to Rosenberg, the Mayo clinic in Rochester no longer prescribes Ambien to inpatients “because they are four times as likely to experience falls from the drug” and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration “found Ambien-related emergency department visits almost doubled from 2009 to 2010 from just four years earlier.”
Rosenberg also discusses a British Medical Journal article that found a 5.3-fold higher risk of death and a 35 percent higher risk of cancer amongst users of sleep medications, and quotes one co-author of the study stating, “We tried every practical strategy to make these associations go away, thinking that they could be due to use by people with more health problems, but no matter what we did the associations with higher mortality held.”
Getting to sleep in a post-Ambien society (Reporting on Health Member Blog, September 20, 2014)
