Benzo Withdrawal: Running with the Devil

     Songwriter, singer, and often voted one of the top guitarists of all time, Eddie Van Halen was an electrifying, high energy stage performer who thrilled millions. He had stage fright, though, and his misguided father was the first to recommend Eddie have a couple shots before going on stage to quell his nerves.

     His alcohol consumption finally got out of control, and Eddie knew it. He went for help to stop drinking, and a doctor even more misguided than his father put him on Klonopin. After Eddie fell on stage one night while performing, he entered rehab to kick the benzodiazepine Klonopin. The subsequent withdrawal symptoms almost ended his career. 

     He was running with the devil, indeed.

     Van Halen said he became “catatonic” for a year and spent most of 2008 sitting on a sofa watching Law and Order on television. “Yeah, I was gone,” the once so dynamic artist said.

     “I don’t know what dimension I went to, but I was not here. I literally could not communicate” because of the spirit-numbing effects of the “horrible drug called Klonopin.”

     He was finally able to return to writing and performing, but only after a long recovery from the stultifying effects of withdrawing from the destructive drug.

     Fleetwood Mac star Stevie Nicks also identified Klonopin as “a horrible, dangerous drug.” She had been put on the drug by a psychiatrist in order to “help” her kick her cocaine addiction. She was kept on Klonopin for eight years. She could no longer perform, she could no longer write songs, and, per her own words, she felt “the lights went out” in her eyes and she had been reduced to a “whatever person.”

     Finally, like Eddie Van Halen, she realized Klonopin was destroying her. She checked herself into a hospital and underwent a horrible forty-seven days withdrawing from the benzo. She described the withdrawal as her feeling like “somebody opened up a door and pushed me into hell.” She added that withdrawing from Klonopin was far worse than from cocaine.

     If Klonopin can reduce such god-like creative geniuses like Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Nicks to virtually dead beings, what is it doing to the two million other Americans now prescribed this satanic benzo? They’re only mere mortals.

     Or at least they were before they started taking Klonopin. Who knows what they are now.