Inside CNN Benzos Report: The Next Big Drug Crisis?

Boulder's Jana Hill doesn't appear on the October 6 edition of CNN's This Is Life With Lisa Ling, which explores whether fallout from the widespread use of benzodiazepines, or benzos, such as Xanax and Klonopin could become America's next big health crisis. But the protocol she developed to help individuals prescribed these and other popular anti-depressants stop taking them without suffering from a wide range of horrific side effects informs the episode, says Krissy Tyrrell, one of the main interviewees.

"Jana basically walked me through how to get off the medication, and her method worked," maintains Tyrrell, who lives in suburban Chicago. "And thank goodness, because doctors don't understand this."

That's true all too often, Hill agrees. "These are controlled substances, and prescriptions are supposed to last for no more than a month — but some people are left on them for decades. So you can't blame the patient. You have to blame mis-prescribing."

This observation is seconded by Dr. Scott Shannon, a board-certified psychiatrist with The Wholeness Center, a Fort Collins clinic that specializes in assisting individuals dealing with the worst benzos symptoms; it's the only medical facility in Colorado recommended by the Benzodiazepine Information Coalition, widely acknowledged as the Internet's top resource for facts about this growing problem. (Tyrrell is on the coalition's board.) "I've been working in the area of integrated psychiatry for thirty years, training physicians to avoid these medications at all costs," Shannon points out. "But they're still given out like candy."

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