Two hundred years of dependence on antianxiety drugs

✍ Scribed by Stefano Olivieri; Timothy Cantopher; J. Guy Edwards

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 608 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/hup.470010210

✦ Synopsis

Dependence has developed in the case of each antianxiety drugs introduced into clinical practice during the last two hundred years. Throughout this time there has been a reluctance to accept that anxiolytics are drugs of dependence and this has led to prolonged delays in the recognition of the problem. New compounds have been used to treat addiction to older drugs, even after the new drugs themselves have been shown to be addictive. The limitations of existing methods of assessing addictive potential should be more widely recognised and patients treated with new antianxiety drugs should be monitored more intensely and for a sufficiently long period to decide definitely that the drug does not cause dependence. It is hoped that drugs free from addictive potential will one day be produced, but it is possibie that dependence is an unavoidable price that has to be paid for having antianxiety drug in our pharmacological armamentarium.