Drop Down MenusCSS Drop Down MenuPure CSS Dropdown Menu
Showing posts with label Sedatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sedatives. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Sedatives and drug addiction - Medicines and rehabilitation

SEDATIVES

Sedatives constitute a large family of compounds with relaxing effects on the nervous system. Dating back to 1846, the barbiturates are the best known.

 Many barbiturates with different types of action are available. Some, such as pentobarbital and secobarbital, are fast-starting and short- acting, exerting their effects quickly but for a relatively short period. Others, phenobarbital, amobarbital, and butabarbital, are slow-starting but long-acting. Most often abused are the short-acting compounds, commonly called goofballs and barbs. In normal, medically prescribed doses, barbiturates mildly slow the heart rate and breathing, lower blood pressure, and mildly depress nerve activity.

In larger doses, they may cause confusion, slurred speech, and staggering, deep sleep-symptoms much like those of alcoholic inebriation. Sedatives not only produce tolerance so that increasingly greater doses are needed to achieve the same results; they also produce physical dependence.


Their abrupt withdrawal can lead to cramps, nausea, delirium and convulsions, and, in some cases, sudden death. Withdrawal must be carried out in a hospital over a period of weeks with gradual reduction of dosage. It isn't only large dosage that can be fatal. Even a small dose may produce slowing of reaction and some distortion of vision. Barbiturates Drugs are a major cause of automobile accidents. 

The combination of barbiturates and alcohol is especially dangerous; the two substances have a synergistic effect in which each greatly increases the effects of the other. Barbiturates are frequently implicated in suicides, but they also cause many accidental deaths which only appear to be suicides.

 A major problem with barbiturates is that a user may react more strongly at one time than another; and with a strong reaction, there may be some confusion about how many pills have been taken and the user may groggily go on to take more, sometimes a fatal over dosage.