I, for one, am very grateful to the writer for writing this article. I had no idea Ambien had these side effects.

..."Chester the Molester" was NOT trying to give you great head, lady. He half-awoke in an Ambien-induced fog and thought you were his mother, and was trying to burrow back in.

A former boyfriend of mine took Ambien, didn't abuse it, didn't drink alcohol with it. He would 'sleep-eat'-- wake up in the morning and find food in his fridge gone, such as when the bagels were still there but the cream cheese dish scraped clean (you could see the finger-marks in the dish). So I don't think the vicious letter-writing troll who chastised every person with an Ambien prescription (ok, basically he chastised the entire human race, as we're all so obviously below him) as too stupid to read a prescription bottle was an accurate criticism; some who take it as prescribed still get negative side effects.

While the open letters forum has certainly been entertaining, some incredibly snippy and others quite profound, there's some letter writers in this thread that are so over-the-top angry I have to wonder why they can't get a life instead of read things on Salon they don't like, then post self-righteous angry diatribes chastising the author... and rest of the world. What's the deal, no dog to kick, no wife to beat, so you have to come in here and take it out on the rest of us?

Mean people suck.

-- that being the bizzare effects of ambien on behavior and perception. I've woken up on a friend's porch in sub-freezing weather (at least I had the sense to bundle up before I left), had my apartment fill up with hallucinatory people with whom I could converse telepathically, and god knows what else. Then there's the times I'd wander out into the living room naked and dazed and stare at my roommates for a while. Almost inevitably I'd wake up to text messages and/or voice mail to the effect of "wtf were you on last night?" Sometimes it'd actually put me to sleep, if I took it when I was laying in bed with the lights already off before I finally slugged it down.

I'm certainly not the only person that gets seriously weird under the influence of the stuff. The hallucinatory, mind-bending effects wouldn't be so bad (they might even be fun) if not for the near-to-total anterograde amnesia that ambien invariably produces. Sanofi claims that the rate of "psychological reactions" is under 1%. That's hard to take seriously. I've never met anyone who takes the stuff who just falls asleep and stays asleep through the night every time they take it. Is it just my friends?

Ambien is totally unlike any other sleep medication in its effects on behavior and consciousness. What's responsible for those unusual effects is not (pubilcly) known, but it's not mediated through the same receptor as basically every other rx sleep medication on the market. Supposedly it's a "selective omega-1 [or 2 or 3, I don't remember] agonist", like benzodiazepines but more specific in its binding. Somewhere in the Sanofi archives are the results of a receptor binding assay that demonstrated activity somewhere else, if it hasn't met the shredder already. Something else is involved, and no one has taken the trouble to elucidate exactly what.

Mean people suck. -- anonandon

But nice people swallow. ;-)

They just don't swallow everything they read on Salon.com or in the letters to the editor. If anyone is dumb enough to deliberately not follow the directions on the side of the bottle, they get what they deserve. If anyone has documented behaviors after taking a presciption drug properly, they should also have the common sense to immediately stop taking the medication and report their experiences to the doctor who prescribed it. Unless, of course, they get a better offer for their story from Salon.com.

Truth hurts, deal with it. When you find yourself bitching about tone, it's usually a safe bet you're just setting up a straw man rather than deal with the truth...because that would mean having to accept reponsibility for your own behavior, and we all know what a drag that is, don't we?

While the open letters forum has certainly been entertaining, some incredibly snippy and others quite profound, there's (sic) some letter writers in this thread that are so over-the-top angry I have to wonder why they can't get a life instead of read things on Salon they don't like, then post self-righteous angry diatribes chastising the author... and rest of the world. What's the deal, no dog to kick, no wife to beat, so you have to come in here and take it out on the rest of us? Mean people suck. -- anonandon

So, anonandonandonandon, you're advocating animal abuse and spousal abuse over the exercise of free speech, because having to read things you disagree with presents some kind of unbearable burden?

"Mean people suck" is just another way for the writer to say, "You suck." While saying, "You suck," may not be mean, it certainly isn't friendly, nice, polite. Pot, meet kettle.

It is anger, or is it righteous indignation? Many people didn't like Dr. King's tone, either...most people dislike hearing truth spoken to power when they're in power. In this case, people have the power to follow a prescription's directions, to document behavioral changes, to stop taking (or sometimes abusing) a medication. Instead, the piece's author preferred that her flavor of the week abuse his prescription meds and wants us to snicker at her cleverness then share in her sorrow. Notice, she found a few takers...the same people who went on to admit they, too, are so stupid they also abuse drugs or choose to not do much about its side effects.

LeCastor has been the funniest--he takes great umbrage at being labeled a dopehead yet each post more strongly advocates 'recreational' drug use and at the same time contained more typos than the previous post. As if someone were 'under the influence.'

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The latter is kind of fun and quite easy to do. Case in point, anonandon.