Sleepless Nights
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006There’s no motivation like a PR nightmare. This from Ad Age:
Two weeks after news that taking Ambien could result in binge eating and driving while asleep, sales of sleeping medications began tanking, finally causing Sanofi-Aventis to wake up and advertise the safety of its product. And it looks like rivals won’t be far behind.
The print campaign for Ambien, the $2.1 billion leader in the insomnia category, began three weeks after The New York Times reported March 8 that Ambien was linked to traffic arrests around the nation by drivers who had no memory of getting behind the wheel, and two weeks after researchers at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Centre and the Mayo Clinic found that some people who take Ambien binge-eat while sleeping.
In the two weeks after the Times’ initial report, prescription data specialist Verispan Yardley, Pa., found that the number of new prescriptions for all sleeping medications slid more than 7% from the previous month. That’s a big reversal, considering that sleeping pill prescriptions grew a whopping 55% between 2001 and 2005.
I’ve thought more than once about taking something like Ambien since I’m pretty much an insomniac, but I probably would have been one of those sleep-walking binge eaters. So instead, I surf, read or watch Lifetime (or the man hater channel as my husband calls it) until the wee hours of the morning. Until I’m either totally exhausted or bored out of my mind. But at least if I go on a binge, I’ll remember it.