Dr Andrew Weil: Xanax Addiction is Worse Than Opioids

Now, what do you do when people come to you and they're on antidepressants? Well, I have a book called Spontaneous Happiness, which is about emotional wellness. There's a lot there about antidepressants. First of all, they don't work so well. That's very hard to... Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. It's hard to distinguish them from placebo's. The popular ones, the SSRIs. And now, because they don't work so well, you know what doctors do? They add one. They add an anti-psychotic drug. We're horrifying. These are like for major mental illness. They're not things you just add on to make the antidepressant work better. We've talked about that one ad nauseam on this podcast because it turned out to be the most prescribed drug in America. I can't believe that. That's just astounding. Well, the word is that 25% of women between 40 and 50 are on antidepressants and 10% of adults in the country. All right. Now, here's another. That's a crazy number. The pharmaceutical companies have done a great job of convincing people that ordinary states of sadness are problems of brain biochemistry that need to be treated with a drug. We're not supposed to be happy all the time. Secondly, there's a big problem with a lot of the medications that we use. And antidepressants are a good example. Most of the medications we use are counteractive. They oppose some process in the body. So when you do that, the body pushes back against it. That's called homeostasis. An easy example you can relate to is if you have a stuffed up nose, you spray a drug in it that decongests you. Miraculous, right? You can breathe. And depending on which drug you use, two hours, four hours it lasts, but when it wears off, you have rebound congestion. That's worse. If you use another dose of the drug then, very easy to slide into... How dare you, Jamie? Very easy to slide into a state of dependence on it. Same thing happens with many of these drugs. Since they raise serotonin levels at neural junction. So what is the body going to do if you force an increase in serotonin? It's going to make less serotonin and drop serotonin receptors. So if you stay on one of these for any length of time, when you get off it, you're going to be in worse shape than you were to begin with. And this now has a medical name. It's called tardive dysphoria, meaning lingering bad mood due to the drug. So the drug actually prolongs or intensifies the depression. You may be okay for very short term use of very severe depression, but these are not things you want to go on and stay on for lengths of time. What's fascinating to me is when I talk to people that are on them that want to talk to you like they're on some cancer medication or they're on something that cures polio. They make it seem like you're insensitive to the possibility that there's other solutions. And there are many other solutions. We have really good evidence for the antidepressant effect of physical activity. Both to prevent and treat. We have very good evidence for supplemental fish oil, for omega-3 fatty acids to prevent and treat. And the microbiome looks like it's involved in our mental states as well. So there's so many different ways of it. Yes, CBD for sure. So again, it gets back to inflammation. And it gets back to an integrative approach and not just relying on a single thing like a pharmaceutical treatment. Yeah, I've talked to intelligent people that are on SSRIs in one form or another and even ones that have struggled were on one for a while and then it stopped working and then they tried another one and then they're combining ones. And they're on this weird sort of chemical roller coaster and they reject any possible notion that there's other alternatives, especially when you bring up the exercise one. I bring up the exercise one and they go, oh, this fucking meathead and this exercise. We just stop and I'm like, I'm telling you. We did this thing with my friends called Sober October and what we did is we know alcohol, know anything for the month of October, but also we did this fitness challenge and we got really carried away and we're all competing against each other with this heart rate out. So we're working out three hours, four hours a day. It was crazy. But what was interesting about it to me was not just that your body sort of adapts when you force it to work out that many hours, but that your mood is phenomenal. I felt so good. And I was telling everybody, if you could take what I like, I don't feel that good right now. I mean, I feel great, but I don't feel as good as I did during October because I was working out four hours a day. It was, if you could get that in pill form, you would take it every day. If there was no side effects because it literally removed anxiety, all the internal chatter, all the negative chatter, it was gone. Everything seemed amazing. True. And there are side effects of physical activity are great. You know, it revs up immune function, improves digestion, improves sleep, all that. You mentioned anxiety. By far and away, the most effective treatment I found for anxiety is a simple breathing technique. You know, regulating the breath. I've seen this work for the most extreme forms of panic disorder. And the drugs that we use for anxiety are the worst. The benzodiazepines, highly addictive, mess with your mind. Yeah. I have a good friend who has an issue with anxiety medication and he takes it all the time. He takes it, apparently it has that rebound effect. Rebound, exactly. Right. He gets horribly anxious. Well, these are handed out like candy and nobody warns people how addictive they are. It's a worse addiction than an opiate addiction. It's Xanax? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.