Ambien Nation: Asleep at the Wheel

Today’s N.Y. Times focuses on a spike in traffic accidents caused by the prescription sleeping medication Ambien, whose trade name sounds vaguely like the French for “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!”

Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug.

In some state toxicology laboratories Ambien makes the top 10 list of drugs found in impaired drivers. Wisconsin officials identified Ambien in the bloodstreams of 187 arrested drivers from 1999 to 2004.

With doctors writing Americans 26.5 million prescriptions for Ambien last year, it’s hard to think of a better metaphor for a citizenry that’s asleep at the wheel while the SUV of state careens from the road of democracy into the ditch of despotism.

"Doctors are handing out these drugs like Pez," said William C. Head, an Atlanta lawyer who is one of the nation's leading defense lawyers specializing in impaired-driving cases.

Americans have slept like drugged-up babies while the current regime has outrageously stripped them of rights guaranteed by U.S. Constitution; indefinitely imprisoned citizens without habeas corpus or access to a lawyer; wiretapped Americans without court warrants; jailed journalists and conducted whistleblower witch hunts; lied about WMD to invade and occupy foreign lands; planted propaganda and fake journalists in the media; tortured detainees in violation of our treaty obligations and military laws; broken the wall between church and state; trashed the separation of powers that was supposed to protect us from tyranny; and through either sheer ineptitude or purposeful negligence lost the World Trade Center buildings and the wonderful City of New Orleans.

If the United States were a person, the last five years would be like this …

A registered nurse who lives outside Denver took Ambien before going to sleep one night in January 2003. Sometime later — she says she remembers none of the episode — she got into her car wearing only a thin nightshirt in 20-degree weather, had a fender bender, urinated in the middle of an intersection, then became violent with police officers, according to her lawyer.

Are we medicating ourselves to sleep because we’re kept up at night due to worries about our kids’ futures? Long wars? Peak oil? Or, do we want escape from the incessant ads, the traffic jams, the mortgage, the rent and the reality of post-9/11 USA.

What will it take to snap us out of our Ambien-induced national snooze? The Congress made the despicable USA Patriot Act a permanent law today. They also gonna OK Bush’s illegal wiretapping after the fact. We’re watching Iraq come apart like gossamer in our hands. The there’s the housing bubble, crushing debt, loose nukes and Dubai Ports World.

Hello America! It’s time to wake up now!

Anybody awake out there?

Hello?