Jenna woke up on her kitchen floor. All she could remember was bending over the sink, trying to swallow water. She managed to get out her cell phone, but her mind was too cloudy to call for help. She was shaking violently and she could see insects crawling all over her kitchen. Naturally she was scared. The thought that she might be dying had entered her mind, but she still had no idea what was wrong with her.
Over the next two days Jenna couldn't eat or drink and her mind drifted in and out. Finally, Jenna's mother stopped by and was shocked to find her daughter curled up in a fetal position on the floor, clutching her cell phone and twitching uncontrollably. She immediately took Jenna to ER, where they asked her if she had taken any drugs or alcohol, but she honestly told them that she hadn’t.
Then the doctor asked Jenna what prescriptions she was on and Jenna explained that all she was taking was generic Xanax for anxiety, noting that two nights before she passed out she’d run out of the pills, but because she’d felt better at the time had decided to get them later.
After testing her blood and urine, the doctor administered another drug that, like Xanax, is part of the benzodiazepine family.
"Almost immediately, I stopped shaking and felt totally normal." Jenna said. "It was as though nothing had ever happened. Nobody there told me, but I put it together: I'd been in withdrawal. I was dependent on Xanax."
Jenna had first gotten a prescription eight years earlier when she was a student and had seen a doctor complaining of insomnia. After discussing her problem "he decided I was anxious." she said. "I had a busier life than some, but I didn't think I was especially anxious. He told me there was this great drug I could take. He prescribed a milligram per day of the generic form."
"Dependence on benzodiazepines like Xanax is a serious problem, especially among young women." said Harris Stratyner, cochairman of the medical scientific subcommittee of the nonprofit National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. "Frequently, it's not because they've been abusing the drugs; it can be caused by following the prescription their doctor gave them."
A tranquilizer, Xanax has many close cousins, including familiar names such as Valium, Klonopin and Ativan. Alprazolam (Xanax's generic form) is the most prescribed psychiatric drug in the United States, reports health care technology and information company IMS Health. There's good reason: used properly and under the right circumstances, Xanax works fast and safely to relieve symptoms of anxiety and panic disorders, as both clinical studies and patient experience show. However it interacts unfavorably with a number of drugs and therefore patients taking it need to be closely monitored.
"If you mix a benzo with another drug that subdues your nervous system—painkillers, alcohol, antihistamines—the effects can be dangerous or deadly," Jennifer A. Reinhold said. "Remember Heath Ledger?"
Long term use of the drug is not recommended and even during short term use there were many cases when things went wrong for the patients. Consumed daily and in high doses Xanax often leads to physical dependence, in which patients taking the drug believe that they can’t survive without the pills. Sometimes the craving for the drug becomes so strong that people buy medication sold by online pharmacies or even from street dealers. Of course, not everything that is sold on the internet is what it claims to be and there were a number of cases where people died after taking what they thought was their previous medication and was in fact something else altogether.
An estimated 14.7 percent of Americans ages 21 to 34 have taken tranquilizers without a prescription or even recreationally according to 2012 data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Meanwhile, the number of ER visits from people misusing or abusing alprazolam skyrocketed 172 percent from 2004 to 2011, the most recent data available. The problem is that even when used as prescribed, Xanax is habit-forming.
If that happens and you abruptly stop taking the drug, you might go into withdrawal. This can lead to muscle twitches, depression, anxiety and, in its severest form, seizures. "Withdrawal from benzos can be more dangerous than withdrawal from heroin." says Dr. Stuart Gitlow, an addiction psychiatrist and president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.
According to Robert Chew, a psychiatric-pharmacist specialist in Sacramento, 5 to 10 percent of users of benzodiazepines also have so called Paradoxical Reactions and these are most often seen in children and elderly individuals. Paradoxical reactions of Xanax include nervousness, aggressiveness, violent behavior, self harm, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, suicidal intentions, hallucinations and paranoia. Paradoxical reactions can occur after short-term or long-term use.
(From my research for the new novel.)
