The FDA announced today that certain sleeping pills, including Ambien and Lunestra, may contribute to behaviors known as "sleep driving" in which people get behind the wheel of their cars and drive without really realizing what they are doing, where they are going, or why they are driving in the first place. I've had some first hand experience in dealing with court cases (mostly DWIs) in which people claim to have experienced this, and despite the fact that I'm typically pretty skeptical about the excuses that defendants come up with on DWI cases (i.e., I was tired and had a long day and that's why I ended up reeking of alcohol and crashed my car into a telephone pole), I actually think there might be something to this whole "sleep driving" thing for people who are on Ambien. I've talked to several officers (at least one of them a DWI enforcement unit officer whom I trust a great deal) who say that they've pulled people over in their pajamas who seemed to be almost "waking up" upon being stopped- people who remembered going to bed, but the next moment found themselves being pulled over by the police with no idea how they got there. The whole thing sounds pretty incredible, but I've heard it quite a few times from defense attorneys on behalf of their clients, and more recently even from officers who stopped people over who seemed genuinely bewildered about their own behavior and how they came to be on the road in the middle of the night (I guess it's kind of akin to waking up a sleepwalker- if you've ever had to wake one up, you've seen the sort of disorientation, confusion, and often even alarm that sets in when they become fully conscious and don't know where they are).
Anyway, we've been discussing the effects of these drugs up at the courthouse from time to time as the issue has arisen in various cases, so it's just interesting to see the FDA taking official notice of the phenomenon. Hopefully a greater awareness of this potential side effect can somehow keep people from getting behind the wheel after they've taken the drug (no, I'm not sure how- I guess you need to hide your keys from yourself or something. And no, I don't know how you hide something from yourself. Go away. Quit asking questions.)