I Wanna Be Sedated....

March 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Valley of the Rolls
By MAUREEN DOWD
I'm not going all confessional, like one of these bare actresses baring her soul on the cover of Vanity Fair. But I have a desperate secret, as the actresses like to say, that may help others if I talk about it.

Or not.

I am a sleep-eater.

It has happened only a few times, and I'm not sure if it's connected to Ambien. It started last year when a jumbo pack of Oreos mysteriously went missing in my kitchen. I came down one morning to find the plastic sliced open and all the cookies gone. I called my exterminator, certain there was a crumb-covered critter lurking. He never found one.

A couple of other times, when I was staying in hotels with minibars, I found Snickers wrappers by the bed or telltale Toblerone chocolate smears.

I confided in a friend, a fellow occasional Ambien user, who said he woke up sometimes with Jackson Pollock-like splatters of Good & Plenty on his white T-shirts.

New Yorkers have been calling their doctors and nutritionists this week to see whether they should switch hypnotics, now that Minnesota researchers have suggested that Ambien may be creating a new form of ravenous sleeper cells, an alarming development given that some people had actually been taking Ambien to avoid the urge to stay up and raid the fridge.

It may just be a new form of avoirdupois rationalization. (That's my story, dear, and I'm sticking to it.) But a California woman included in one of the studies said she gained 100 pounds from sleep-eating while on Ambien; a Minneapolis woman in a full body cast was discovered by her son sleepwalking to her kitchen, frying bacon and eggs on one night and turning on her oven to 500 degrees on another; a Tennessee nurse said she'd devoured a whole package of hamburger rolls "like a grizzly bear."

Susan Chana Lask, a New York City lawyer, has filed a class-action suit against the makers of Ambien on behalf of users — who are overwhelmingly female. She gives examples of bad behavior by what she calls " 'Night of the Living Dead' creatures": driving impaired and eating raw eggs and even a buttered cigarette, and sleep-shoplifting DVD's.

Far more women suffer from insomnia, and far more women — even young ones — pop sleeping pills than men. As Ariel Levy wrote in New York magazine, pills are now seen as "brain styling," not mind-altering, because "the line between medication and recreation has become blurred."

One girlfriend of mine wanted to call her Upper East Side doctor yesterday and switch to Lunesta. "I have visions of myself in my Subaru crossing the George Washington Bridge at 3 in the morning covered in Cheetos dust," she said. But then she realized they'd probably find out something equally weird about Lunesta next week — that it causes you to run off with a Starbucks barista and go to male strip clubs in your sleep.

The scary news of zombie hordes of Ambien sleep-eaters follows fast upon the scary news of zombie hordes of Ambien sleep-drivers and zombie hordes of Ambien sleep-sirens.

The New York Observer recounted the saga of an attractive editor at a fashion magazine who hooked up with a young man in Soho and took him back to her place.

"She was laying there and had taken her clothes off," he told the paper. "Then, in completely slurred speech, she said: 'I just took two Ambien, so anything you're going to do, you better do it before I pass out.' "

The next mishap is sure to be sleep-governing. A headline on Wednesday read "Study: Ambien Users Invade Countries in Their Sleep; Wake Up With No Memory of Reasons for Invasion, No Exit Strategy." The story was written by the humorist Andy Borowitz, who also imagined that an Ambien side effect might be a tendency of some politicians to concoct incomprehensible prescription drug programs while asleep.

But real life once more outstrips satire, as the military in Iraq conducts Ambien air assaults. The president and some Pentagon officials have no memory of authorizing the strikes, and the generals in Iraq have no memory that they've already used these tactics without lasting success.

There is, after all, precedent for Sleepers in Chief. The first President Bush's doctor caught flak for giving him the sleeping pill Halcion — fingered as a possible contributor to Poppy's embarrassing frow-up moment at a state dinner in Japan.

If you don't want to give up Ambien, doctors say, put chimes on your bedroom door. The tinkling may wake you up on the way to get a snack or take a drive to shoplift a new wardrobe for your fat zombie self.

John Tierney is on vacation.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Happy St Pats!! Be Careful Out There!

Help Save Darfur!

How is it that we are wasting lives, money, and maybe our very souls, on this Iraq war; a war that we created under false pretenses, rather than stepping up to Darfur to stop the genocide there? What makes our government's decision makers think that this choice makes sense?
How can we stand by and let this happen?
Please consider following the links below and getting involved in some way. Its important to know what's going on anyway.
Doctors without borders seems to be the only relief agency helping the people...And its also one of my Mom's favorite charities.

March 12, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Village Waiting for Rape and Murder
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KOLOY, Chad
Politely but insistently, the people in this town explained that they were about to be massacred.
"The janjaweed militias have already destroyed all the villages east of Koloy," Adam Omar, a local sheik, explained somberly. "Any moment, they will attack us here.
This remote market town of thatch-roof mud huts near the Chad-Sudan border is on the front line of the genocidal fury that Sudan has unleashed on several black African tribes. After killing several hundred thousand people in its own Darfur region, Sudan's government is now sending its brutal janjaweed militias to kill the same tribes here in Chad.
President Bush is showing signs that he may be ready to stand up to the thugs in Sudan, but China is protecting Sudan, Europe is inert, and the African Union can't even muster the courage to call for immediate U.N. peacekeepers. So the people here are probably right to resign themselves to be slaughtered — if not sooner, then later.
Koloy has no electricity and no phones, so the people could not call for help. But even if they could, no one could help them. Chad's small army had sent a few trucks of troops the previous day, but after learning that they faced more than 500 janjaweed armed with heavy machine guns, the Chadian soldiers had dashed away again. As I drove into town, the town's police force was fleeing on horseback.
I visited the "hospital" — an open-sided tent that lacked any medical personnel but was filled with gunshot victims. Local leaders told me that the janjaweed were only three miles away and had sent word that they would attack Koloy that day.
"When they see you, they shoot you," said Adam Zakaria, the sheik of a nearby village, Gindeiza, that had been attacked the day before. Mr. Adam had one bullet wound in his foot and another in his thigh.
"I know the man who shot me," Mr. Adam said. "He used to be my friend." That man, Hussein al-Beheri, is an Arab neighbor. But last year, according to Mr. Adam's account, Mr. Hussein joined the janjaweed and now regularly attacks non-Arabs.
"I told him, 'Don't shoot me!' " Mr. Adam recalled. "Three or four times, I pleaded, 'Don't shoot me.' And then he shot me."
Ten people are known dead in his village, Mr. Adam said, but many others are missing — and no one has been able to look for dead bodies because the janjaweed still occupy the village. Among those missing, he said, are his two wives and four children.
"I have not seen them since yesterday, when they were in the village," he said. "In my heart, I think they are dead."
This entire area gets no visits from diplomats and no help from the U.N. or aid groups, because it is too risky. Only one organization, Doctors Without Borders, sticks it out, sending in a convoy of intrepid doctors three days a week to pull bullets out of victims.
It was nerve-racking to be in Koloy, and my local interpreter kept insisting that we rush away. But I've never felt more helpless than the moment I pulled away in my Toyota Land Cruiser, waving goodbye to people convinced that they would soon be murdered.
In the end, there was no janjaweed attack that day. Perhaps that's because the janjaweed have found that it is inconvenient to drive away absolutely all Africans; now the janjaweed sometimes leave market towns alone so that their own families can still have places to shop.
The people of Koloy are still waiting to be massacred. Think for a moment what it would be like to huddle with your family every day, paralyzed by fear, waiting for the end.
And then remember that all this can be stopped. You can go to http://www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org/ and send a postcard to President Bush, encouraging him to do more. At Genocide Intervention, you can find a list of "10 things you can do right now."
Maybe it seems that you have no real power to change anything in Koloy, but, frankly, right now you're the only hope that the people in Koloy have.•
Bill O'Reilly refused to join me on this trip, passing up the $727,000 that my readers had pledged to sponsor his trip to Darfur. But Ann Curry of the "Today" show and a top-notch NBC crew did travel with me on this trip. Unlike Bill, Ann didn't flinch at traveling in janjaweed-infested areas or at staying in a primitive $4-a-night "hotel" with no plumbing. (O.K., she did shudder just a little at the wildlife in the hotel's outhouse.) If you want to break your heart, watch her reports beginning tomorrow — and ABC and CBS, where are you?
In the meantime, watch my Op-Ed special report from this trip, "The Genocide Spreads."
Frank Rich is on a book leave.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company