The Other Prescription Drug Problem: ‘Benzos’ Like Valium and Xanax

The issues with opiod pain medications are becoming more and more well known, but receiving less attention as the news focuses on pain killers are drugs prescribed for mood alteration. Medications targeted for anti-anxiety, such as Klonopin, Valium, Ativan, and Xanax, are also addictive. Which is a problem as prescription rates increase, and the stress and pressure of modern life encourages patients bombarded with advertisements or even encouragement from friends who found stress relief in pill form to ask doctors for the medications.

Clinical research shows these benzodiazepine medications should be used as a short-term solution, but doctors are often allowing patients to use them for much longer periods of times. Years in some cases. The addition that can form with benzodiazepines is not just mental, though that is certainly a factor. Most concerning is how the anti-anxiety drugs can form physically addictive effects. Long-term patients can experience cognitive damage, see their balance and coordination affected, and have a measurably higher level of mortality than those who are not regularly taking the medications.

Rates of use of benzodiazepine medications has increased more than threefold since the 1990s in America. Deaths involving drug overdoses see benzodiazepine on the list of what drugs were found in the deceased’s system in a third of such incidents.