Ready for Takeoff? Please Fasten Your Seat Belt and Pop the Anti-Anxiety Drug of Your Choice.
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.18.06 | 3:06 PM ET
Make it Xanax or Valium or Ativan. Or just go with a sleep drug such as Sonata or Lunesta or Ambien. Don’t know which one’s best for you? Consult the interesting and highly informative story by Alex Williams in Sunday’s New York Times about the rise in popularity of prescription drugs among fliers in the age of terror alerts and cramped 737s.
“Everybody personally and professionally that I know who is afraid to fly gets their hands on Xanax,” said Jeanne Scala, a psychotherapist in Roxbury, N.J., adding that she has seen an increase in patients and friends talking about taking medication for flying jitters. “They’ll do anything to take the edge off the anxiety of sitting in a plane,” she said. “They just want to zone out, they want to sleep. So they’ll take Ambien, Sonata, even pain medication like Soma, which is for back pain. People use whatever they have—the pharmacy in their house.”
Just how effective are these drugs? I’m not a nervous flier, but I travel often with one, so I can attest to the power of a half an Ativan to calm nerves during turbulence. According to the Times’ story, the drugs alleviate much greater dangers than that.
Williams writes:
A few days after the terror arrests in London last month, a small commuter plane with three tourists was banking off the coast of Costa Rica when a sudden sound, like a muffled explosion, shattered the calm. The rear door of the plane, improperly shut, had blown open.
There was a moment of panic for two of the passengers. But Roger Knox, a graphic designer making a connecting flight before boarding a jetliner home to San Francisco, was not worried. He had just doubled his usual preflight dose of Ativan, a prescription anti-anxiety drug, in anticipation of the ride on the small plane.
Not sure I’d want to take anything that makes me—or my traveling companions—that calm.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor of World Hum.
