Americans have been flirting with various prescription drugs – opioids, stimulants and depressants – for quite long. As a result, the nation has been paying in the form of a drug epidemic that claims thousands of lives every year. Ironically, the number is only growing despite several measures by the authorities.
While opioids are largely blamed for this public health crisis, sedatives or tranquilizers also play a key role. Because of the way depressants impact the central nervous system and cause it to slow down, use of sedatives leads to a sense of calm, sleepiness, and serenity. Some popular sedatives across the age-groups are barbiturates, benzodiazepines, alcohol and even opiates to some extent.
While people have been consuming alcohol since time immemorial, drugs like barbiturates emerged as a How to Buy Xanax 1 Mg Online without Prescription result of the backlash against common opioids, including opium, morphine and heroin, in the 1910s and the 1920s. As these drugs were associated with a particular race and Buy Xanax Online ethnicity, these were looked at with suspicion.
This phenomenon has been explained in detail in “Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac,” by David Herzberg, associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As a result of the widespread hostility, doctors who had previously been prescribing morphine for insomnia and anxiety started prescribing barbiturates to patients.
Barbiturates, unfortunately – as was discovered later – were as risky as opioids. It was then that benzodiazepines came into existence. The first benzodiazepine was introduced in the 1960s. By then it was apparent that barbiturates were harmful, and raised the risks for overdosing, addiction and death, and thereafter their use for medical.