They'll have to take the pills from my cold, dead hands
Marijuana lobbyist Bob Barr argues that a spate of "responsibility avoidance" defenses based on the effect of drugs has encouraged criminals planning on crime to take Ambien as anticipatory defense. Patrick Kennedy argued Ambien made him crash his car into the capitol. People have complained of waking surrounded by crumbs and wrappers and concluded the drug made them eat in their sleep. The Drug Law Blog thinks Barr's fears are overblown, but a school board president blames Ambien for attacking his former wife and her boyfriend at her home without a realizing it. Full disclosure: no Ambien was consumed in drafting this blog post.
"What happens is the patients get out of bed, walk to the kitchen, prepare food -- often sloppily, and often with strange, high-calorie ingredients," Silber tells WebMD. "They have microwave food sometimes. They eat in a very sloppy way, either in the kitchen or after taking the food back to bed. And they have no memory of it. They wake to find a mess in the kitchen or crumbs in the bed."
posted by wretchardthecat at 4/27/2007 05:30:00 PM
9 Comments:
Why do you never hear of persons awakening to a freshly painted room?
You'll never ascribe virtuous acts like painting a room to the ingestion of Ambien because you couldn't take credit for it. Imagine telling your wife you bought roses for her birthday because you were in a drug stupor. How long would you last in your job if you said you made that killer stock trade but couldn't remember how you did it? What could Einstein boast of if he awoke to find he had written the General Theory of Relativity without knowing how to derive it?
Victory has many fathers. Defeat is an orphan.
re: Imagine telling your wife you bought roses for her birthday because you were in a drug stupor.
How could you possibly have known that!!!?
;-)
My mom was taking 3 ambien a night. She would get up in the middle of the night and hit the fridge. Put on a lot of weight. We changed her sleep meds and she has lost 10lbs.
"What happens is the patients get out of bed, walk to the kitchen, prepare food -- often sloppily, and often with strange, high-calorie ingredients," Silber tells WebMD. "They have microwave food sometimes. They eat in a very sloppy way, either in the kitchen or after taking the food back to bed. And they have no memory of it. They wake to find a mess in the kitchen or crumbs in the bed."
I've had that happen a number of times myself, but it wasn't caused by Ambien ...
Well I did hear once that mass consumption of alcohol can turn you into a Jew-hater, so I suppose some Ambien can turn you into a glutton.
There must be a rehab center for this sort of thing. Which star/starlette should we call for the location?
"She would get up in the middle of the night and hit the fridge."
Could it be that Ambien is a conspiracy by ConAgra and ArcherDanielsMidland in cahoots with Big Pharma?
no Ambien was consumed in the preparation of this comment.
“If I Did It”
It would have been because I took Ambien.
Ambien can definitely have this kind of effect. It shuts down the ability to make good judgments, and causes "anterograde amnesia" (meaning you can't remember later what you did). Unfortunately, while it does make people sleepy, it does not guarantee that they will actually sleep, and therein lies the problem.
It is possible to stay awake (or wake up) even after consuming large amounts of Ambien, in which case you go into a strange state where you perform actions that are deliberate at the time, but are strange, unwise, or even dangerous, and not remembered even a few minutes afterwards.
The less dramatic, but probably more common, problems one is likely to encounter the next day are lingering tiredness, impairment of judgment, inability to concentrate, lack of situational awareness, and degraded motor control.
This is not to say that Ambien is not a useful medication, because it is. However, there is definitely a place for caveat emptor here, because people who use Ambien can do strange things, and should exercise caution. They should definitely not take it at 4:00 AM to get three more hours of sleep, then get up at 7:00 and drive to work.
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