14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest statistics, people who take a widely prescribed class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, or benzos, are at higher risk of becoming addicted to these compounds. In addition, they are at a higher risk of experiencing compounded addictions, usually from drugs that are often prescribed alongside benzos. This type of addiction represents a significant public health problem.
The situation is especially dire in the United States, where benzos such as Valium, Xanax, Klonopin, and Ativan first entered mainstream use between the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, these compounds were widely prescribed to housewives, who had issues with so-called frizzled nerves. Acting as mild tranquilizers that took the edge off, these drugs quickly became extremely popular.
More than four decades later, what were once “mother's little helpers” are used to treat a variety of conditions, ranging from anxiety and insomnia to mood disorders, including depression. Given the extremely high incidence of these disorders in the general population, it stands to reason that benzos usage patterns have also been on the rise proportionately.
However, unlike 55 years ago, users now tend to combine this class of drugs with another, featuring opiates such as morphine, codeine, and thebaine. Opiates are the narcotic opioid alkaloids naturally produce by the opium poppy plant. Derivatives of morphine include oxycodone and heroin. Most often, opiates are used for pain relief in chronic pain patients, NPR reports.
According to Dr. Michael Kelley, who is the medical director of the behavioral department at St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, around 75 percent of all detox patients he handled some 15 years ago were being treated for alcoholism, while the remaining 25 percent were drug addicts. Today, he adds, nearly 90 percent are drug addicts, while 10 percent are alcoholics.
Most of the addicted patients treated at the Center use a combination of opiates and benzos. This is very bad because both classes of compounds are sedatives and both can slow down respiration as a side-effect. When Phillip Seymour Hoffman died this February, for example, coroners found heroin, cocaine, and benzos in his system, which led to acute mixed drug intoxication.
“It's actually pretty rare to see somebody only using only one [class of drugs]. Benzodiazepines and the opiates both can cause death when you take too much of them. But they potentiate each other – they make each other stronger. And so one plus one doesn't equal two; it equals three or four,” Kelley says.
Official statistics produced by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that benzos and opioids together lead to around 30 percent of all opioid-related deaths in the country.
Addiction specialist Dr. Mark Publicker, from the Mercy Recovery Center in Westbrook, Maine, says that the prescription opioid epidemic has thrown the risk of benzos abuse into darkness and neglect. “Benzos do produce a strong, physical dependence that can create life-threatening withdrawal seizures and other consequences, but I think that the perception that they're harmful is low,” the expert says.