Medicine: Bolts & Jolts

According to U.S. census reports, some 225 citizens kill themselves every year by deliberately overdosing themselves with sleeping pills (e.g., Lupe Velez), and another 225 die the same way by accident.

These figures are probably conservative: New York State estimates 20 such deaths a month. About 2,000,000 sleeping pills are sold every day in the U.S., mostly on doctors’ prescription, but a good many of them are bootlegged by unscrupulous druggists. Last week State Senator Thomas C. Desmond announced a bill to make it as hard to buy sleeping pills in. New York State as to buy narcotics.

Some facts:

¶ Most of the pills are barbiturates, which do not cause drug addiction. Some doctors avoid giving them if possible, as they can produce a pretty good jag, and neurotics or psychotic people can develop a sort of addiction. But many other doctors feel that any harm in sleeping pills is slight compared to their benefits, during mental or physical emergencies.

¶ Some users become habituals by depending on the drug to put them to sleep instead of reforming their unhealthy habits. They, and unstable people who deliberately take too much, occasionally develop chronic poisoning, resulting in drowsiness, bad memory, depression, confusion, stomach trouble, etc.

¶ Doctors generally believe that the barbiturates are a safe way of soothing a patient, if the patient follows orders—since the deadly dose is some 15 times the sleeping dose. They consider most “accidental” barbiturate deaths as suicide, and point out that people who really want to commit suicide could do it almost as easily with too much aspirin or by eating a lot of toothpaste—certain kinds.

Some bored Broadwayites take amphetamine sulfate (benzedrine, the popular stay-awake drug) along with barbiturates, to get an effect called “a bolt and a jolt.” It lays a man out, then snaps him to. The antithesis of the barbiturates, benzedrine has a stimulating effect (much like ephedrine or like the body’s own adrenaline). The Army sometimes used benzedrine to keep flyers awake on long missions.

Benzedrine also has its ,addicts and can produce bizarre symptoms. An interesting case was reported in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine: a neurotic 49-year-old lawyer, formerly a very heavy drinker, who originally took the drug on a doctor’s prescription for an “all-gone feeling.” He found that “the effect of the drug was so stimulating that he gave up the use of alcohol. . . .” From a starting dose of a twenty-fifth of a gram a day, he worked up to one-quarter of a gram a day in five years, at the end of which he had to go to several doctors in order to get enough prescriptions. He was by then taking enough to kill most people. All this time he worked as a guard at a war plant, did some law work in the evenings and ate and slept well. (This was unusual. Most people cannot sleep for a good many hours after taking benzedrine.)

But gradually he got sleepless. He thought that searchlights shone in his bedroom and that he was being followed. He quit his war job and began to hold conversations with his soldier son overseas who, he claimed, was overhead in a helicopter. After a month’s hospital treatment —during which he was given no drugs—he went home with no serious physical effects from the benzedrine, and convinced that no helicopter was overhead.