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NEWS
Xanax is ruining people’s lives
By Associated Press June 9, 2016 | 2:39pm
http://nypost.com/2016/06/09/xanax-is-ruining-peoples-lives/ MINNEAPOLIS — Aaron Dimler was on his way. The captain of his football team at Roseville High School, he had a job, a long-term girlfriend and a scholarship worth $240,000 to study and play football at Macalester College.

Then he started taking Xanax.

When he saw that University of Minnesota wrestlers might be involved in a ring to buy and sell the same anti-anxiety drug he was abusing, Dimler chose to speak up.

“I thought I was an anomaly — a college athlete that screwed up my football career and my school career by using drugs,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “But when I saw that, I knew it wasn’t just me. I knew it was a bigger problem.”

Dimler, 19, has completed drug treatment, more than two months after he was admitted for in-patient care. After flunking out of school. After the withdrawal seizures. After waking up in his girlfriend’s car surrounded by the flashing lights of White Bear Lake police squad cars.

He suspects he had been passed out for hours and still doesn’t remember everything about that night. But one thing, he said, was immediately clear.

“I knew at that point I was going to jail, and that it was not going to end well,” he said.

Xanax, or alprazolam, is an anti-anxiety drug in the benzodiazepine family, a depressant similar to Valium and Ativan prescribed for extremely stressful situations for those suffering from severe anxiety, such as plane trips or the first day of school.
“What we hear from our young adults is it’s easier to get (prescription) drugs than alcohol and nicotine, because people are checking for those.”
- James Johnson, addiction care manager for HealthEast

Abuse of prescription opioids such as Vicodin and OxyContin have dominated the drug-abuse narrative in recent years, for good reason. But benzodiazepine has become “a huge problem,” said Dr. Joseph Lee, medical director of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Youth Continuum in Plymouth. Overdose benzodiazepine deaths are growing, Lee said, but that’s not the only frightening thing about benzodiazepine addiction. For one thing, one’s tolerance for drugs such as Xanax increases quickly and by leaps and bounds, as Dimler can attest.

Dimler had tried Xanax in high school, he said, but just once. “It didn’t do much for me,” he said. So when, as a freshman at Macalester, a friend suggested he try it to help him sleep, he didn’t think twice. He took 1 milligram, four times the usually prescribed dosage.

Within weeks, he was physically dependent. The day of his DWI arrest, March 9, he had taken 12 “bars,” large, easily purchased tablets of 2.5 milligrams each — 10 times the usual dosage for Xanax. That night, Dimler took 120 times the usual dosage.

That combination of tolerance and dependence, Lee said, makes it hard, if not impossible, to kick without medical treatment, sometimes causing seizures — which happened to Dimler.

Perhaps even more dangerous is the fact that, like alcohol, benzodiazepines can cause blackouts, which is how Dimler came to be in police custody. In a sense, he was lucky. Blackout behavior on drugs like Xanax can be dangerous.