Generation Xanax: The Dark Side of America's Wonder Drug [View all]

Two years after she started taking Xanax, Dana Bare began having panic attacks like never before.

Her memory started slipping. Her husband had to remind her how to make a sandwich. Bare’s ailments cycled her through emergency rooms and puzzled specialists, some of whom thought she was mentally ill or had cancer. No one knew what to do other than up her Xanax dose, to 2 milligrams a day at one point.

The popular pills had been a blessing at first when her general practitioner prescribed them for mild insomnia more than a decade ago. Bare was a busy mother of five running a charity based in Smith County, Tenn. Xanax helped sleep come easy.

Over time, though, her nervous system developed a debilitating physical dependence on the drug. When she tried to quit after five years, crippling symptoms consumed her. “Brain zaps” hit her like electric shocks. Shower water jolted her so badly that she would suffer hourslong panic attacks and at times writhe in pain until she passed out.

“Never forget how much I have always loved you, but don’t spend too much time missing me,” Bare wrote to her oldest daughter in 2018, when she worried she might die amid her two-year journey to get off the drug. “There has never been anything greater than being your mama.”

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