Xanax is Cause for Anxiety

Can Xanax, the very popular prescription drug that soothes anxiety, make a mess of your life? Absolutely, it can -- and not just because it’s highly addictive. It can easily kill you if you take too much of it. Frighteningly, we are seeing that increasingly as people are dying... or driving so uhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnsafely that they might kill others.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Xanax is old -- it was first marketed in 1981 -- but boy, has our society had a hard time learning to deal with it safely. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a report announcing that Xanax has become one of the leading causes of drug overdose in the state of Florida, where fatal overdoses of prescription drugs are now four times as common as those caused by illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine. (A news story in the St. Petersburg Times reported that Xanax is turning up along with alcohol in the blood of an alarming number of people arrested for driving "under the influence.") According to a recent report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the US Department of Health and Human Services, benzodiazepines are more commonly used for "recreational" purposes than opioids -- and among them, Xanax is the most commonly misused. Thirty years after it was introduced, what we have with Xanax looks to be a serious problem in the making.

Xanax (or alprazolam, its generic name), an anti-anxiety medication, is a controlled substance for which US doctors wrote 37.5 million prescriptions last year, nearly 40% more than five years ago. Why does a 30-year-old drug experience such a radical surge in popularity? It is prescribed as a treatment for panic attacks and general anxiety disorder, but many people who have no particular medical condition take it episodically, on an as-needed basis, simply as a way to get through life’s typical stressful situations -- such as disagreements with a spouse... a presentation or performance review at work... flying in stormy weather. And many doctors are only too happy to let fly Xanax prescriptions for these uses. All this doesn't even take into account the illegal usage that takes place with Xanax.

The benefits of taking Xanax aren’t worth the risk. The side effects of Xanax include drowsiness, clumsiness, difficulty walking, slurred speech and loss of libido. Xanax is faster-acting than Klonopin and Valium and has a shorter half-life, which means people may need to take multiple doses over the course of the day to maintain whatever benefits they can derive. A patient may be prescribed, say, two to four pills a day and end up taking even more as his body acclimates to the drug. It takes just a few months for physical dependence to develop and with dependence comes a multitude of difficulties when it comes to withdrawal. There’s also a psychological dependence at play, a particular problem with anxious people who end up being anxious about their anxiety, taking more pills -- and ending up with a problem that spins out of control. Xanax (or taking it in combination with other drugs such as narcotics) can cause serious reactions, including respiratory depression, cessation of breathing -- it can even cause the heart to stop beating. Another major problem: In older people, the drug is especially prone to impair balance. Research has shown that benzodiazepine drugs are the cause for many falls in the elderly.

So, yet again we seem to have wound our way back to the same conclusion -- not only does taking a pill to make a problem go away usually not work, in this case it makes the problem worse. If you are in the habit of taking Xanax for your anxiety, you’ve gotten reason to look for an alternative!