Eventually this sends the patient to a doctor/dealer to escape their misery of detox/relapse cycles. The gates to hell are finally opened once a benzo is prescribed.
One entrepreneur ended punching a bouncer and attempting to flee on a bus to some random city, spending more than a week in jail. Another fled the U.S. after making a lot of crazy purchases and life choices, he is now living in a war zone voluntarily. The amount of DGAF/YOLO these drugs give the user are very understated. The withdrawals were much worse. I’ve never seen someone down almost a whole handle of bourbon just to get “normal“. The brain zaps and the tics/twitches were very noticeable.
Stevie Nicks has also spoken publicly about her struggles with Klonopin withdrawal. BEWARE!!!
This is so wild to me because output and work quality rapidly decline at (or well before) 40 hours a week. It sounds like a joke, but I probably have 4 good hours in me a day. Sure, more if I'm really into something, but working 4 hours a day 3-5 (max) days a week will actually achieve peak results in my experience.
When I have to work on single a software-only project, after about two weeks of sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, I absolutely have to do something else.
I would say that less than 25% of a startup CEO’s workload requires the “well-rested, highest quality thinking” that you describe. A lot of it is simply quantity and determination. The output of “having grit” is not that you are suddenly smarter - it’s that you are less willing to stop.
I’d be a far more successful startup CEO if I were cracked out Vyvanse right now because I’d be getting g done mind numbing but necessary tasks with deadlines.
As it is I made a decision a while ago to prioritise personal health over greater business success.
1: Benzo's, as they call them, reduce inhibitions greatly, and also reduce short-term memory. If you take a 1 MG Xanax with no tolerance, and you have a bottle of 10 more pills, somewhere within the next 12 hours, you will take all 10 of those extra pills. The "High" has a very "I don't feel it" quality, because all that's really happening is your inhibitions are vanishing. So, geez, I don't feel it, I'll take more! Keep in mind, a 1 mg Xanax is usually supposed to be cut into 4 doses.
2: Driving on Benzo's almost always results in a "Americas Most Dangerous Police Chases" type behavior. The driver will likely have taken, now, 11 mgs of Xanax, and will awaken in a jail cell 2 to 3 days after the car incident, completely unaware of what has transpired. Guaranteed they fought the cops 100% of the way to that cell, too, so they don't know where the bruises came from.
3: A real Benzo fiend "blacks out" all the time. A common theme in this subreddit would be "I took 1 MG, had a 100 pills left. Woke up 1 week later with pictures on my phone of myself and 3 other people having an orgy. No pills left. I don't remember any of this." It's astonishing how much people can down in such a binge. Seems it's hard to OD. HOWEVER.....
4: If you are addicted to benzos and you quit cold turkey, you can die. Seizures, blackouts, flu-like symptoms. Its BAD. This is not Heroin. You have to slowly taper off of them, like you were decompressing from a deep ocean dive, over weeks, if not months. Or else you DIE!
5: You can go online right now and get a prescription for this stuff from some disgraced doctor through a startup like those Viagra, ADHD, or GLP1 pharma mills.
6: DON'T EVER TAKE A BENZO, EVER. Maybe 1 before eye surgery where they can't anesthetize you and you leave without any more pills.... Something like that. Otherwise, avoid.
So there we are in a regular pub, about 11pm. One guy starts dialing on his phone and says, "I'm gonna pick up. You want in?" I kind of smirked and said, "uhhh I don't smoke weed dude. Thanks." And he looked at me like I was an innocent deer and said, "umm, we're going skiing dude. this is how we stay up."
Oh boy. I was never addicted to it thank god, but what a wild couple of years that was.
Right before my cofounder and I wrote down our values, when we were done, I said, okay, now we’re both going to schedule the labs and checkups I know we’ve both been procrastinating.
Let’s just say that was the difference between stage 1 and stage 4… by a few months. It has been probably our defining corporate value ever since. And yeah I don’t ever expect an outside investor to like that.
Take the adderall and benzodiazepines out of the equation and they might just as well be using cocaine and barbiturates.
Benzodiazepines, and alcohol, can actually induce death if you withdraw too quickly
... let's dial this back a little here. I've been a (prescribed) benzo user for ~15 years, across xanax, valium, and klonopin. I regularly go for weeks at a time without taking them or thinking about them. I have taken some very, very large doses before (as part of a now-resolved fear of flying).
Firstly, yes, obviously, they are addictive. This is compounded by the fact that people are generally prescribed them when they really need them, and they are highly short-term effective. If you have acute mental distress and someone gives you a drug that switches that off in the short term, you are going to really want more of it when that distress comes back. Many people seem to have at least some low-level mental distress, and so many people respond really well to benzos. They also cause physical dependence, so cessation if you've taken them chronically for as little as a few weeks is going to be somewhere between annoying and extremely rough, quite aside from the addiction.
Secondly, the "amount of DGAF/YOLO". Some users experience dose-dependent impaired judgement, probably similar to alcohol? If you've taken a serious dose, you'll know you've taken something psychoactive. This isn't something that needs to factor in to your risk profile for taking 5mg of valium. A very small number (1%?) experience severe impaired judgement. Test one first.
Overall, they are a drug to approach with a lot of caution, and with the help of a doctor who you think understands the risks, like opiates. But like opiates, they are a miracle solution to a very difficult problem. If your doctor thinks you need to carry some Xanax around in your wallet for panic attacks, don't assume all hell will break loose. If your doctor wants you to take klonopin for five days while you switch SSRI, that's probably OK. If you're terrified of flying, but need to make your once-a-decade flight, gladly accept a dose of valium. On the other hand, if your doctor is prescribing a four-week once-a-day schedule, urgently seek out a second opinion unless they sit you down and are very clear on the risks with you first, and even then do some of your own research.
But be aware that they are highly effective at removing your acute mental distress, and if that's an issue for you anyway, you might be about to feel better than you've felt in years, and you need to be sure you're not going to reach for them when you don't actually need them, and kick off an addiction that will be very, very hard to shake.
Bottom line: miracle drug, but be as skeptical of them as doctor-prescribed opiates.
> Having kicked opiates cold turkey in the past, I felt nostalgic for three simple days of traditional nausea, sweatiness, and bone-deep ache.
There is no way to explain the hell on earth that is benzo/GABA-ergic drug withdrawal, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy. It is an order of magnitude more intense than opiate withdrawals, and the timeline is weeks/months rather than days.
Like the author, I managed to quit via a year-long Ashton protocol taper.
The irony is that benzos were the one class of drugs I wasn't abusing for recreation. I was using mega-doses of Etizolam to cope with PTSD flashbacks, and only discovered I had become physically addicted after flushing it all and winding up in the ER.
Weeks to months is actually pretty fast for benzo withdrawl IME.
For me it took nearly an entire year to feel completely normal. I was only taking 10mg diazepam per day (not a big dose).
To anyone on the journey now... hang in there. It feels never ending. But I promise you... you will wake up one day and feel completely normal.
Diazepam half life is so long that dependence can develop even when not taking it every day.
Edit: and I totally believe there are people who can take the same amount as me and not become dependent as easily as I did. Everyone is different
This is a desirable trait when tapering a dose. It reduces hour-to-hour blood level variation which reduces the whole up-down of alternating between euphoria and rebound anxiety. Idea is to target a constant level which is tolerable and slowly lower it.
The article implies this (a Valium taper is mentioned) but I don't think it outright states it so I'll say that for anyone who is addicted to a fast-acting one like Xanax or Klonopin - a switch to Valium might help.
My taper was nearly one year. Ten years off now.
My best friend was not so lucky and was on ativan and had the worst experience getting off of it, and had years of problems with it because it aggravated the anxiety she was already experiencing.
Benzodiazipenes (sp?) has it's medicinal uses, particularly with injury or surgery; but yeah -if you're not very careful and very lucky it's hell to get off of if you end up dependant on it.
I'm very glad to see the word is getting out and is more wide-spread. I hope that it doesn't result in a complete freakout the way that oxycotin did. It's vital when it's needed, hopefully it will remain available.
What gets me, as someone with chronic anxiety, is that they've only come up with one thing that reliably works -and it's this. It feels like the research stopped in the nineties or so. I often wonder wtf about that.
I use it to deal with my anxiety.
I don’t trust benzos in the slightest. Especially so after reading the horrors of this thread.
Must admit though I've not had any drug - prescribed or illicit - that had a more immediate and powerful effect on my anxiety than a benzodiazepine (granted I've not tried heroin before!).
Thankfully they are incredibly hard to get prescribed where I live due too all the above associated dangers.
After two or three months I discontinued it. He suggested to just stop, but I thought better of that, tapering through 0.25mg and 0.125mg. What followed was weeks of unrelenting insomnia and headache.
I wouldn't recommend.
I always feel awful when I hear people making fun of him for this. It seems like it's one of the most horrible and difficult things out there.
Almost a decade ago now, I was a happy, high-functioning alcoholic. Winery tours, Scotch tastings, workplace drinks, etc.
It was all "fine" until I started struggling to get to sleep without a little "nudge"; then it was getting back to sleep in the wee hours; then it was every hour or two, 24x7.
Then I decided to go cold turkey while on vacation in Hawaii with my family, because who wants to be the drunk asshole in search of a cocktail while everyone else is having a good, sober time at the beach?
Boom: detox seizures, ER visit, and the ever-so-helpful prescription of Ativan so I wouldn't seize again. I was discharged with the instructions to "take as needed, up to every four hours." Since I was an addict in pain, I took that to mean, "take them every four hours, or maybe more often."
Cut forward 3-4 days, and the scrip ran out. Boom: more DTs, this time from the benzos.
It wasn't long after that when I went through my first inpatient psych visit b/c I was in no way equipped to handle withdrawals from two highly-addictive drugs at the same time.
Sadly it took another couple of years and another trip through the ER + inpatient care before I realized that doctors would and did prescribe me meds that were actively harmful in the interest of short-term comfort.
It's been six years since the last big episode and I'm genuinely grateful I only threatened myself with my shitty brain chemistry (however aggravated by poor medical intervention) rather than putting other people at risk. It could have been much worse if, say, I routinely drove people around or did any kind of safety-critical work.
Regardless: benzos are not "lightweight" drugs, and giving them to people with any kind of history of substance abuse disorders is a Bad Idea.
I'm glad to hear you (all) made it to the other side, and hope your stories give others who are struggling with addiction courage to seek help and free themselves.
I've also seen friends or family members who used and stop these drugs without much difficulty.
This isn't medical advice obviously, but I wouldn't rely on anecdotal experience to form an opinion on this. These drugs can certainly be helpful to some people.
I certainly wouldn't want them removed -particularly after spending 4 months going through different surgical procedures where benzos were medically indicated. But awareness of the down-side is thin on the ground (from my perspective) and it's good to get out there.
That said: do not abuse benzos. They will fuck you up.
I was prescribed temazepam for insomnia. It was the only sleep medication that worked, and it was the best sleep I've had in my life. It stopped being effective after around 30 days (or maybe 60, I forget). That was the end of that. I could have argued for a higher dose or a refill or whatever, but... you don't fuck with benzos.
>That said: do not abuse benzos. They will fuck you up.
This is pretty much my perspective, except I'd say that it doesn't even necessarily require abuse per se. I'd say just be very careful when using them, and get off of them ASAP. Myself, I only take them if there's a procedure of some sort they're called for.
I'd say awareness is more called for than a total ban. A total ban would be messed up because there is zero replacement for them for what they do -none.
Many people receive opioid treatment and do not become addicted. In fact most do. Most people can drink alcohol without becoming an alcoholic. This isn’t a proof that “anecdotal experience” that opioid addiction and alcoholism aren’t serious problems. In fact it is a demonstration that they are insidious for that exact reason - it’s fairly easy to slip through the cracks in the system into a serious problem that is life altering and extraordinarily difficult to emerge from.
Finally, the hardest withdrawals I’ve seen are benzo withdrawals. Relapse is also extremely high because the profound anxiety that led to the addiction is amplified in the years of subsequent withdrawal with very little as effective as a benzo to mitigate it. Paralyzing irrational fear is in many ways worse than pain, and pain is often a symptom to boot.
I feel that perhaps saying “well not everyone, take my anecdotal experience” isn’t the most empathetic response, and the statistics bear this out. The prevalence of benzodiazepine dependency is roughly on par with alcoholism in the US and several times that of opioids. The distinction is that crisis level addiction is roughly the same as opioid, while alcohol is roughly 7x worse. This likely because acute alcoholic behavior is rapid and very readily observable, while opioid and benzo dependency can be masked behind an otherwise normalish appearing life. The decline is fairly slow often unless you trip over into fentanyl. Further the prevalence of common use of both opioids and alcohol is much higher because surgery and recreational alcohol use is fairly prevalent while anxiety disorders less so.
Stevie Nicks is a popular icon who has been very public about how hard her withdrawal from Klonopin was, including how her skin sloughed off among other horrible effects. She lost a large part of her life span to it. But otherwise it’s also a relatively under reported dependency given its prevalence.
https://time.com/3482462/rolling-stone-stevie-nicks-drugs-mu...
I’d also note in many countries benzodiazepines are highly controlled with much higher bars than US, including the UK, where they’re only allowed in crisis, not general anxiety disorders less.
It takes at least a few weeks to a few months of daily use to develop dependence.
During a crisis I took it for a month. Then stopped. Stupid as it may be, I only fairly recently learned that this drug can cause hell but for the life of me I couldn’t understand how. All it did for me is help me sleep. I didn’t understand how it can be abused or what’s the recreational part of it. When my doc told me about the dependence, and how it may creep stopped even my occasional use and the bottle I got last Jan still sits in my meds canbinet.
Could it be that different people have different reactions or may be more susceptible to addiction to it?
I have watched family members die of AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimers. I have myself recovered from alcoholism (5 years next month!). Nothing in all my life has ever held a candle to how hellish Benzo withdrawal is. These drugs need to be banned. Period.
I've lived with that as well, but I've also spent months carved up (surgically) and there is no replacement for the role that they play medically.
I can't agree with a complete ban. It's better to get awareness out there about the harm they can do, and put better controls on access to them but not a ban.
I live with anxiety -there's no other drugs that work for it. Luckily I'm able to use DBT and straight up avoidence to cope with anxiety. But if I didn't have that last option then I'd be hosed -because there really is not anything that works effciently for treating anxiety; at least not in my personal experience (which goes back decades).
I don't think so. It should be drilled into doctors' heads to prescribe them very cautiously and always warn about the addiction potential. But they have their legitimate uses and in some cases are irreplaceable.
Obviously it's been overprescribed. Old school doctors likely still do prescribe it too easily. And new docs often plainly refuse to prescribe it at all. The solution doesn't have to be black or white. Doctors have the ability to limit the number of pills per month a patient can get, imagine that! It doesn't have to be nothing at all vs as-needed-which-means-the-full-30-pills-every-month-inviting-the-patient-to-start-taking-it-daily. It can be "give 5-10 pills per month".
That way the doctor can monitor the patient needs more closely and effectively prevent both addiction and tolerance from developing (to preempt: no, most people cannot in fact easily source it from the black market, and doctor shopping is no longer a thing for controlled drugs thanks to the opiod crisis).
My own family had a similar problem. The family member was way over-prescribed a drug by a doctor who clearly wasn't helping treat the underlying issues and frankly barely remembered the patient from month to month (for a person they were seeing every month). It still took us nearly a year to find a doctor we could switch to because everyone we called was so freaked out by the dosing the prior doctor had prescribed that half of them wouldn't even touch the case at all, and the others wanted to just stop everything cold and start all over again. The problem with that being that the underlying reason they were getting prescribed these medications was still an issue. Asking someone who does need the medication in question (or similar treatment) to not only suffer without it for a few months but also just stop their escalated doses cold turkey is just needlessly cruel and harmful. We were lucky to finally get a doctor who accepted helping us get things under control, with a pre-made plan of action and a "sole-prescriber" contract, both of which was fine, we just needed someone whose plan didn't start with "and now you stop everything you're taking to treat your condition and we wait until you're detoxed before we try anything else".
There’s definitely a lot of factors
I agree, it depends on what else is going on -and why you're taking things. No way in hell I could have gone that month without them, that's for sure.
The good news is that the Klonopin let me sleep -- the first regular sleep I'd had in three years, when I first started using it.
However, I'm on a journey to get completely off of it. I managed to do that for several weeks, but when I then tried to ween myself off the other drug I'm on for insomnia, mirtazipine, it came back. So I started taking Klonopin again, temporarily. I'm now in the process of getting off of it for a second time.
Personally, I didn't find this that hard. The key, for me, was just to take it very slowly. Reduce 10%-25% at a time, and stay at that dose for 4-8 weeks. Repeat. Be patient with yourself. It took around six months the first time. I did have one crazy symptom: in the middle of the night, if I woke up, I could close my eyes and watch my visual cortex go haywire. It was like a fireworks show. That eventually went way, but man, it took months.
Was told by the doctor it was a much safer alternative to most other treatments. Could be worth asking about.
The doctor gave me the minimum amount of pills to get me through the initial chronic period, 7 days, and I was very grateful to be made comfortable.
I was lucky that my back healed quickly, even after a few days on the drugs I detected a feeling of dependency creeping up.
It's like the jackpot for patient mill doctors. Aha, there we are, we can just blame it on that, collect their insurance, and send them on the way.
More recently another friend mentioned getting prescribed a rather hefty dose for his anxiety. I convinced him otherwise with science backed evidence and accounts like what OP linked, given his personality type I'm certain it would have ended him.
"MISUSE OF CLONAZEPAM CAN CAUSE ADDICTION, OVERDOSE, OR DEATH. Keep the medication in a place where others cannot get to it. Never share clonazepam with another person. Selling or giving away this medicine is against the law.
Some people have thoughts about suicide while taking clonazepam. Tell your doctor right away if you have any sudden changes in mood or behavior, or thoughts about suicide.
Get medical help right away if you stop using clonazepam and have symptoms such as: unusual muscle movements, being more active or talkative, sudden and severe changes in mood or behavior, confusion, hallucinations, seizures, or thoughts about suicide.
Do not stop using clonazepam without asking your doctor. You may have life-threatening withdrawal symptoms if you stop using the medicine suddenly after long-term use. Some withdrawal symptoms may last up to 12 months or longer."
I hear this all the time and never get it. Didn't these people go to school? People talk about this every day on the internet. It's right there on Wikipedia, even.
And by the way to get off of them, I read that the most successful people statistically with the ones who did a very gradually. So again I took the scissors and I was cutting small amounts off of pills so that I was sometimes taking some multiple of 1/8 of a pill And when I made adjustments I might go down by 1/8 or 1/4 per week.
My anxiety problem actually played a role in me being afraid to take too much anxiety medication ha ha and that probably saved me
I've had anxiety issues my entire life, and I feel exceedingly grateful that I haven't fallen into the benzo trap. I've had prescriptions for them, but I always found them too impairing for anything other than very sporadic use (like on airplanes, back when I had anxiety around flying).
I actually find beta blockers, taken as-needed, to be infinitely more beneficial when it comes to managing anxiety. There's some really interesting research on propranolol specifically and how it disrupts memory reconsolidation - which (deceptively) sounds like a bad thing, but it actually has beneficial implications on fear extinction and trauma responses.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8201901/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8979654/
Just to drop a couple links. There's a good amount of research out there.
I successfully eliminated my fear of flying with beta blockers (this was after xanax made it much worse, which turns out is a documented phenomenon https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9299803/). I like that, at least for more specific fears/anxieties, propranolol's fear-extinction mechanism means that you often need the drug less and less the more often you take it for that purpose. I haven't flown medicated in many years; my "amygdala is rewired" in that area and it seems it's more or less permanent.
I take beta blockers maybe a few times per year, on average, but I always keep my prescription up to date.
I'm something of a beta blocker evangelist (if it wasn't obvious), but I think they're deeply underappreciated when it comes to treating anxiety. I think a lot of people get spooked when they see that it's "heart medication", but it's really well-tolerated medicine for most people.
Here’s a video of a doctor talking about the dangers of BIND (Benzodiazepine-Induced Neurological Dysfunction) in the context of some clips of Peterson and his daughter talking about his experience. [1]
Definitely something that it’s good to raise public awareness about, because they are very widely prescribed (10% of women over the age of 50, for example) and a lot of people being prescribed these drugs likely don’t fully understand the risks.
Many years ago my partner at the time was prescribed Klonopin, primarily as a sleep aid. When he decided to go off it, he talked to his psychiatrist and was given basically no helpful guidance on how to go off. In retrospect I consider that malpractice. It was absolute hell and it took him well over 18 months to finally kick it (and it's not like he had a large prescription in the first place).
One reason I was so pissed is that as he was going off it I did some research and discovered that the NHS in the UK had an entire extensive protocol for people getting off Klonopin that required months of tapering and replacing Klonopin with a less powerful benzo (I think it was diazepam, or Valium) so you could taper at a more gradual pace.
It's insane to me that it's not required for doctors to explain the withdrawal procedures before writing a prescription for any drug that is physically addictive.