Cocaine teens fuel big rise in Valium abuse
Valium, the sleeping pill that gained notoriety 40 years ago as 'mother's little helper', is damaging a fresh generation of women who use it to relax and go to sleep after taking cocaine or amphetamines.
Doctors warned this weekend that they are seeing a huge increase among teenagers and women in their twenties who are unaware that the little blue pills are potentially fatal when taken with alcohol, as well as being highly addictive. Patients who try to come off the tablets suffer withdrawal effects for weeks, including hallucinations and anxiety attacks, which can be worse than the symptoms that accompany withdrawal from cocaine or ecstasy.
Valium, widely prescribed in the Sixties to women with anxiety or depression, is the brand name for diazepam, one of a class of tranquillisers and sleeping pills known as benzodiazepines. The pills have gained new popularity as they can be bought cheaply over the internet.
According to Dr Mike McPhillips, who runs the addiction centre at the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, west London, several patients bought them while travelling around south-east Asia on a gap year. 'We are seeing a lot of young women coming in with a Valium addiction, up to one in 10 patients,' he said. 'There's a culture of younger and younger women taking cocaine and if you take half a gram it is hard to sleep, so the dealer who generously sold you that drug will sell you the Valium.'
posted by Pannyxeos at 9:01:00 AM
1 Comments:
My name is Paul Harris and i would like to show you my personal experience with Valium.
I am 55 years old. Have been on Valium for 20 days now. I decided to get off of all benzos after much reading and having a friend who was abusing Xanax kill himself (may have been other issues, too). I was taking about 4 mg of Klonopin daily. I read a lot of the reseach on benzos by Dr. Heather Ashton, one of the world's leading authorities on benzos. I was shocked to see her equivalency table for Klonopin and Xanax. 1 mg of Klonopin or Xanax is equel to 20 mg of Valium. That's right, 20!! Plus, Klonopin and Xanax have nasty side effects. That did it for me. No more benzos!! Because Valium has the longest half-life of any benzo and the least side effects, I'm using it and water-titration to get off Klonopin, a method widly used in Europe. 10% reduction every 10-14 days. So far so good.
I have experienced some of these side effects -
Headache, drowsiness in the morning. Hard time getting my Dr. to prescribe and go along with treatment program. Valium supposedly is far less addicting than some other benzos, with far fewer side effects. I hope that turns-out to be true.
I hope this information will be useful to others,
Paul Harris
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