Calm Down, You’re Going to Die

An extensive long-term study published last week in the British Medical Journal suggests those who pop prescription anti-anxiety pills such as Xanax and sleeping aids such as Ambien suffered a “statistically significant doubling of the hazard of death” than those who don’t.

Perfectly legal pharmaceuticals account for roughly 60% of all American drug overdoses, calmly snuffing out the lives of over 20,000 each year. Xanax is already America’s most-prescribed psychiatric medication, with somewhere around 50 million prescriptions written yearly. It is said to be more addictive and harder to kick than heroin. Check out the anxiety-free, half-alive woman who comes in at around 1:00 of this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjpD41mMG8o&w=640&h=360]

Withdrawal symptoms—which can last for years—include blurred vision, chest pain, diarrhea, high blood pressure, impaired hearing, impaired memory, impaired concentration, mood swings, nausea, vomiting, convulsions, hallucinations, DTs, mania, psychosis, schizophrenia, delusions, PTSD, seizures, stroke, coma, and suicidal ideation.

Sounds like a party!

Xanax is designed to kill anxiety, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. A little anxiety is good—even necessary. Otherwise you wind up with cockroaches crawling over your face with the house on fire while you hit the snooze button and roll over.

If it seems as if I’m taking all this a bit too personally, it’s because I’ve seen people close to me whose brains were turned to jelly by prescription drugs, and they were lured into abject addiction by the idea that since a doctor was prescribing the pills, they had to be good for you.

You’ll belch and scream and shout and holler that I don’t “understand” mental illness, not realizing what a drooling, medicated zombie you sound like. Pause for a moment before shoving the next pill down your throat and consider that maybe you’re a tool of a huge medical industry that has greatly expanded the definition of “mental illness” to rake in bucks while it crushes your spirit and turns your mind to thin grey gruel.

And if you scoff and snort and chortle and guffaw at what I’m saying, you won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you. That may be because you’re dead.