What Are The Risks?
Although the newer nonbenzodiazepine pills are theoretically less perilous, the truth, as with most drugs, is more complicated.
Common side effects for sleep aids can include daytime drowsiness, shallow breathing, and confusion. In the case of zolpidem, hallucinations are possible.
Less common, but nevertheless problematic, are parasomnias, a set of sleeping disorders involving bizarre behaviors over which the patient has no control: sleepwalking, unconscious binge eating, having sex while unawake. Kripke estimates that these complications affect around 1% of users.
If the pills are chased with alcohol, which some people do out of desperation or depression, the results can be even more treacherous, sometimes fatal. According to sleep expert Matthew Edlund, “combining depressants like booze and sleeping pills is a kind of personal roulette.”
But the most critical threat may be to our future selves. According to Jerry Siegel, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA’s Center for Sleep Research, “Evidence continues to accumulate indicating that whereas insomnia does not shorten lifespan if left untreated, the use of sleeping pills does shorten lifespan in both men and women.”
Kripke helped demonstrate this in a 2012 study published by the journal, BMJ Open.
After reviewing the electronic medical records of over 40,000 patients, Kripke and his colleagues were able to identify a correlation between hypnotic sedatives and an almost five times greater risk of death.
Furthermore, they discovered that patients who took at least 132 doses a year had a 35% higher rate of new cancers than those who abstained.