Phenobarbital Abuse
Phenobarbital is one of the first and most widespread drugs aimed at coping with anxiety issues. Many people who suffer from stress, panic attacks, and anxiety take the drug known under the titles Luminal and Nembutal. Although the medicine shows effectiveness in terms of stress resistance, the drawbacks of abuse are also considerable. Phenobarbital has a high level of addictiveness, along with side effects such as feeling tired or irritability.
As the effects of the drug are not long-lasting, people who take phenobarbital tend to use the medicine more often than it is allowed in the drug prescription. Thus, they become addicted to phenobarbital, and this drug dependence leads to people not realizing that they do not need antianxiety drugs in such amounts (“What is phenobarbital abuse?” 2019). At first, drugs such as phenobarbital were replaced with more modernistic versions of antianxiety medications known as benzodiazepines. Although they were supposed to become more efficient in the context of treatment, the risks of drug dependence became even higher.
Hence, people, especially older ones, who have been abusing phenobarbital for a long time, may not withdraw from the drug in order to use the modern ones. First of all, although the side effects of phenobarbital can be more evident than those of benzodiazepines, the process of withdrawal may be quite complicated for long-term abusers. The process of withdrawal is often followed by severe seizures, which should be controlled by specialists.
Hence, once people are to take antianxiety medications, they should be informed that the treatment process often requires some risk and side effects. In the case of phenobarbital abuse, patients who get used to the drug may not handle the medication withdrawal. For this reason, even if other antianxiety drugs seem to be safer or more effective in terms of disease, physicians should pay more attention to the general patient’s well-being and mental attributes.
Meprobamate vs. Benzodiazepines
Over the past decades, anxiety has become one of the major mental issues among the world and the American population, in particular. In the middle of the 20th century, when people only realized that the feeling they experienced is called anxiety, researchers came up with medications known as meprobamate (Levinthal, 2014). Although the medication proved to be highly effective in terms of anxiety handling, being a severe sedative, it had many side effects. People who used meprobamate struggled with a constant feeling of fatigue and lethargy. For this reason, scientists decided to discover a new kind of drug that would be as effective but focused directly on anxiety without having such sedative drawbacks.
Hence, meprobamate was replaced with benzodiazepines, drugs that helped people combat anxiety without feeling tired and apathetic. Benzodiazepines have become extremely popular with American residents over the past years, and such popularity later developed a full-scale epidemic in the country. Drugs like Valium or Xanax are highly addictive, so people who take the medication for more than five or six weeks become dependant on the drug for a long time (Schumann, 2018).
Moreover, benzodiazepines influence human metabolism so that the body requires more drug each time. Hence, the spreading of benzodiazepines has led to an increase in prescriptions by more than 60% (Garrison, 2018). Thus, when it comes to contrastive analysis of meprobamate and benzodiazepines, it is complicated to define the benefits and drawbacks of each of them.
For example, if meprobamates do not have such a predisposition to addictiveness, the efficiency of the drug is also lower than that of the benzodiazepines. All in all, it can be concluded that both types of antianxiety drugs are highly dangerous for the human body, and self-treatment should be forbidden. Once people are to take such medications, each decision on the treatment should be consulted with the specialists.
References
Garrison, A. (2018). Antianxiety drugs – often more deadly than opioids – are fueling the next drug crisis in US. Web.
Levinthal, C. F. (2014). Drugs, behavior, and modern society. London, UK: Pearson Education.
Schumann, J. H. (2018). Benzodiazepines: America’s “Other prescription drug problem.” Web.
What is phenobarbital abuse? (2019). Web.