In 2006, I started taking Xanax and continued, more rather than less, for the next 17 years. The drug was first prescribed to me after I experienced a panic attack. I had thought that I was dying. My children were two and six years old. We were at home—my husband had gone for the day and the babysitter was late. I started sweating and had this urge to run, to get outside. I didn’t know what was wrong, but my heart felt weird and I didn’t want to die in front of my kids. So I stuffed them in a stroller and went down to the street—West 106th in Manhattan—hoping to intercept the sitter. There she was in the lobby. She took the children. I didn’t explain. On the street, the noises were loud, the light galactic. I think it was summer. I was walking but had no idea where I was going. Fear crawled over me like ants.
A good friend appeared out of nowhere. He smiled and then stopped and asked what was wrong. I fell against him and told him I was dying. He reassured me, instructed me to breathe, then hailed a cab to take me to my doctor.
I loved my doctor, an old man with a tremor. He did an EKG, asked some questions. I started to feel normal. Eventually he explained that I’d had a panic attack, and that they run themselves out. He prescribed a mild dose of Xanax, said it would take the edge off, told me I could bite the pill in half for an even milder dose.
A month or two passed. I was in the subway when the space started to close in on me. The ground felt like glass. I fled because I didn’t want to die down there in front of all those strangers. On the street, I made myself breathe, told myself what was happening, recalled the Xanax and went home in a cab to take one. The pill worked like magic, ease spreading through me pleasantly until I felt normal again.
We are an anxious nation, an anxious world. Look at the news and it is there for everyone to see. Some 16 percent of the US adult population takes medication for mental health (a figure measured pre-pandemic; one wonders what it is today). Years ago, at a party with a new friend, I was admiring her calm happiness. “I’m drugged,” she said matter-of-factly and with a joyous smile. She then pointed to people around the room and told me: “He’s on Prozac, she’s on Zoloft,” and on and on until almost everyone in the room was accounted for.
But this is nothing new. Soma immediately comes to mind, the mythical drug of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects…the warm, the richly colored, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. There is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.”
The name was borrowed by Huxley from the ancient Rigveda, where it is repeatedly praised as a divine potion that bestows euphoria and courage. Other elixirs for inner turmoil tumble
down to us from sources as old as myths. Mandrake, hellebore, hyoscyamus, opium poppy, ergot fungi, peyote, cannabis. Telemachus took nepenthe, Juliet some kind of nightshade, Anna Karenina laudanum. “These are the tranquilized Fifties,” Robert Lowell wrote, famously giving voice to a cultural condition in which sedatives, prescribed as casually as breath mints, seemed the remedy for modern anxiety. Each era has its own reasons for anxiety. If there were a coat of arms for human nature, one element of the heraldry would be a hand reaching for a little something to take the edge off—better living through chemistry.
I never took a lot of Xanax. The dose was so small that doctors rarely saw anything amiss. My dependence happened slowly: At some point early on, I discovered that taking the drug could help me sleep—help me fall asleep, help me go back to sleep when I awoke in the middle of the night. I kept the canister of tablets on my bedside table, like a totem to ward away the sleep demons. Sleep had troubled me since I was a teenager, when my mother would give me pills of calcium in the middle of the night.
Doctors I saw over the years, they’d say, “Well, Martha, you also need to sleep. It’s a small dose you’re taking of Xanax. Don’t worry.”
Most nights I’d bite half a tablet—2 a.m., wide-eyed, my brain electric. Some nights half a tablet wouldn’t work, so I’d take another bite. I never needed more than 1.5 tablets. The prescription was written for .25 mg, 2x per day; a one-month supply amounted to 60 pills, which could last two to three months. The cost, after insurance, was $2.37. Cheap and easy.
In the mornings, I’d wake up feeling rested. I’d have my coffee and start the day. For years, I didn’t think much about this. It was my pattern, how I managed my sleep. If doctors weren’t concerned, then why should I be? In my household, my kids, my husband—they knew that Xanax was my thing. (I did not tell my sisters. I have five. Sisters can be like mirrors. When one sister learned I took Xanax on occasion, she warned me that it might cause dementia, that I shouldn’t risk it. “Read the studies,” she said.) Sometimes when my husband couldn’t sleep, he’d take one. Like me, he is a writer, a poet, vulnerable to the pressures of the creative life. Once he took my Xanax for several nights, depleting my supply. I got furious. I worried the doctor would think I was overindulging. But when I asked her for a refill sooner than usual, she didn’t bat an eye.
This is not a story about how doctors are bad and pills are evil. I believe in medicine, and there is a good place for Xanax when used properly. But I didn’t use it properly.
If people for millennia have sought quick remedies with magic potions to life’s turbulences, in the past 150 years the chemist has been the innovator, harnessing this need. In the realm
of sedatives, the hunt for the fastest acting, least harmful, least addictive medication has fueled an industry. In the 1800s bromides came about, an alternative to alcohol and opium used for centuries. In the early 1900s we had barbiturates, followed by carisoprodol and meprobamate—with brand names like Seconal, Miltown, even Soma. Red Devils (or simply Reds) was the street name for Seconal. All of them captured my imagination as a child when I heard those names tossed about by adults who had trouble sleeping.
In the mid-1900s, benzodiazepines were created by Leo Sternbach for the firm Hoffmann-La Roche. The first in this class was Librium, soon followed by Valium, which immediately became famous among housewives for calming their nerves. Valium would become the pharmaceutical industry’s first $100 million product and the Western world’s most widely prescribed drug. By 1966 it was the protagonist of the Rolling Stones’ song “Mother’s Little Helper.”
