Killing Me Softly: A Report from Benzo Land

By Richard Crasta

Benzodiazepines (sedatives like Valium, Xanax, and Ambien) are dangerously addictive, and unethical drug companies and doctors are causing the slow deaths of millions of people worldwide, the dangers being relatively underreported. Quoting independent medical authorities, his own experience. Detailing the effects, he makes an Impassioned appeal on behalf of all who suffer, most often silently, from this widespread but greatly underestimated affliction and slow poison.

This is also an essay and inquiry into medical ethics, the practice of psychiatry, and the lies of Big pharmaceutical companies in America, and includes some notes on antidepressants.

A warning to the general public, as well as information on how to understand friends and dear ones, and the millions who have accidentally become dependent on Benzodiazepines, this book also speaks for all who suffer, most often silently, and appeals to policy makers and the medical profession to work towards ensuring justice to victims and to behave more ethically in future.

One reader wrote of an earlier edition ("Benzo Land: How Doctors and Drug Companies Enslave You"): “Tells me I am not alone, and is certain to tell many, many, many more that they too are not alone. Your article will define for them their secrets. It will put words to what they do not understand about what is happening to them: the forgetfulness, etc... You have found the words. Those words are a light in the darkness that is Benzo Land when one builds there. Thank you.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Crasta
• Release date: Oct 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310939303

Richard Crasta

Richard Crasta is the India-born, long-time New York-resident author of "The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel" and 12 other books, with at least 12 more conceived or in progress. "The Revised Kama Sutra," a novel about a young man growing up and making sense of the world and of sex, was described by Kurt Vonnegut as "very funny," and has been published in ten countries and in seven languages.Richard's books include fiction, nonfiction, essays, autobiography, humor, and satire with a political edge: anti-censorship, non-pc, pro-laughter, pro-food, pro-beer, and against fanaticism of any kind. His books have been described as "going where no Indian writer has gone before," and attempt to present an unedited, uncensored voice (James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth are among the novelists who have inspired him.).Richard was born and grew up in India, joined the Indian Administrative Service, then moved to America to become a writer, and has traveled widely. Though technically still a New York resident, he spends most of his time in Asia working on his books in progress and part-time as a freelance book editor.

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Killing Me Softly: A Report From Benzo Land

Richard Crasta

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Richard Crasta

All Rights Are Reserved.

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The Publisher and Author have used their best efforts in preparing this book. The Publisher and Author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. There are no warranties which extend beyond the descriptions contained in this paragraph.

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About Richard Crasta and this Book

Richard Crasta, the author of The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel, has been published in ten countries and in seven languages by over twelve different publishers including Fourth Estate, U.K. Penguin, and HarperCollins. A detailed list of books and review quotes are provided at the end of this book. However, as his writings have stepped outside the zone of Establishment acceptance—and these include some of his most powerful writings—he has, for the sake of freedom and to avoid all censorship including self-censorship, the path of independent publishing.

A few books that may be of special interest to readers of this book:

The Killing of an Author

The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel

Father, Rebel, Dreamer

Earlier versions of this book had the main title, Benzo Land, attached to variable subtitles. This new edition has changed its focus, and is now presented as a combination of personal testimony and public interest argument on benzodiazepine dependency and medical ethics, one that might warn the general public of the dangers of benzodiazepines and also appeal to the policy makers. It may also help fellow-dependents, as it did this reader of a previous, short version:

"Tells me I am not alone, and is certain to tell many, many, many more that they too are not alone. Your [writings] will define for them their secrets. It will put words to what they do not understand about what is happening to them: the forgetfulness, etc... You have found the words. Those words are a light in the darkness that is Benzo Land when one builds there. Thank you."

Table of Contents

Epigraphs

Killing Me Softly

Nobody Knows the Benzos I’ve Seen

Benzodiazepines and Their Long-Term Dangers

The Moral Failure of The Medical Community: Suggested Remedies

Epilogue: Moments of Terror ... And Recovery

Why This Book

Other Books By the Author

Praise for the Author’s Other Books

Epigraphs

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, Scene 3

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude.

— Aldous Huxley

[They] wanted to forcibly drug me with Haldol, Ativan, Prozac: which would have chemically lobotomized me.

— Susan Lindauer, ex-CIA Agent who became an antiwar activist.

All doctors are legalized drug pushers. The doctor’s interests and the patient’s interests are misaligned.

— Deepak Chopra, M.D., Interview on CNN

[My doctor] didn’t really get it. No one did. No one would, who hadn’t experienced it. I looked fairly normal. No one could tell how hellish every second was.

— Jack Hobson-Dupont, The Benzo Book

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou. Or, as someone else said (I paraphrase): To tell your story is so basic, such a fundamental part of being human.

Preface: Killing Me Softly

A slow poison, a drug more insidious and enslaving than alcohol, has been killing me ... softly, quietly, but with a quickening pace in the last twelve months. Few of my friends know it, and few have noticed it — unless they know me well and are seeing me after a long break—but now, I am even out of touch with most friends and family, and I do not know if I have twelve months of intelligent or semi-intelligent life left.

Poisoning by benzodiazepines—a class of anti-anxiety, sleep-inducing medications that include Valium, Librium, Xanax, Lorapezam, Klonopin (Clonapezam), and others--though slow, kills your body and your soul at the same time. Many Nobel Prizewinning writers were alcoholics — Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis among them — but highly productive, despite the increasing damage to their livers (an entire book on the subject, Alcohol and the Writer, has been written by David Goodwin, MD); if I could change things, alcohol would be my poison of choice. But I don’t know of Benzodiazepine-dependent writers who managed the same feat.

I am a man in