Talk:Alprazolam

Dependence liability
The infobox currently lists alprazolam to have a "very high" dependence liability. This seems suspect for a few reasons. One is that as a schedule IV drug, its it thought to have a relatively low rate of abuse and addiction in comparison to other substances (namely opioids). Now morphine's infobox stating the the liability of addiction is simply 'high' and hydrocodone's is listed as as 'moderate'. While they are indeed addictive to an extent, I very seriously doubt that benzodiazepines exceed narcotic opioids in addiction potential. I believe this should be reworded, perhaps changed to 'moderate' which seems a lot more reasonable in my opinion. Thoughts?-- Metalhead94 TC 09:27, 13 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The source for the dependence liability only talks about its addictiveness too, it's not actually a comment on the liability of forming a dependence at all and the source seems to agree its addiction potential isn't as high as other drugs, just that the potential patients will abuse it (which does not imply addiction) is higher than in other benzodiazepines. other sources show the general addictiveness of benzodiazepines including alprazolam is fairly low compared to other drugs especially things you mentioned like morphine, oxycodone but also less so than stimulants, at least ones like methamphetamine and cocaine if not milder ones like amphetamine and methylphenidate 103.250.118.163 (talk) 09:15, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Half-Life Elimination Time
Hi All,

The infobox drug currently lists the plasma elimination half life of Alprazolam as 4-6 hours for standard release tables. The reference supplied, a page from rxlist.com, appears to be verbatim a FDA publication, which is fine. However, the webpage sourced makes no distinction between the extended release half-life nor the instant release half-life elimination times, despite that it is used as the source for both IR and XR half-life times.. It appears that this website has created two pages for Alprazolam, one of instant release and one of extended release. The extended release page may be found here: https://www.rxlist.com/xanax-xr-drug.htm#clinpharm. The half life elimination time of this second webpage discussing the XR formulation agrees with the information on the wiki, being 10.7 - 15.8 in healthy adults.

The IR half-life time of 4-6 hours currently listed in the wiki is incorrect. The original webpage, which is still accurate in regards to the instant release formulation, states "the mean plasma elimination half-life of Alprazolam has been found to be about 11.2 hours (range: 6.3–26.9 hours) in healthy adults."

I am new to Wikipedia but I feel like misinformation is being spread by this particular element of the Wiki page. After independent research, I am unable to find a single source stating that the mean half-life elimination time of Alprazolam IR between 4-6 hours.

I will leave this discussion up for about a week, and if there are no objections, I will take the initiative and change the half-life of IR to something more accurate, and update the source for the XR formulation half-life as well.

Cheers — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.144.156.227 (talk) 04:40, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

With half lives we only have a ball park. So many different factors in metabolism. Half-life period is the time required for the dose to become twice less in the system. But even after being made twice less, the dose is still detectable by tests until it is reduced almost to nothing, half by half. Urine testing can reveal traces of Xanax for up to 14 days in the system PantaniPINK (talk) 12:35, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Xanny (song) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 18:47, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Travis the Chimp and Xanax
Currently, there is a section of this article titled "Paradoxical Effects". In 2009, a pet chimpanzee owned by Sandra Herold mauled a friend of Sandra. The chimp had to be shot repeatedly by police because it tried attacking the officers when they arrived on the scene.

Toxicology found that the animal was on Xanax, and the owner at first claimed that she gave him tea with xanax in it to help him relax shortly before the attack. The chimp was usually very well behaved.

Should this information (rewritten however it needs to be) be added to this article? Thought it might be good in the Paradoxical Effects section or perhaps a new section labeled Effects on Animals or something similar. Arizona Ranger With The Big Iron (talk) 22:29, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Orally/by mouth
@Whywhenwhohow Regarding your reversion of my edit:

Quoting from WP:MEDMOS: "Good encyclopedic writing will naturally teach the reader new words and help them build confidence with harder ones. While this can be done explicitly, with definitions in parenthesis for example, the most natural way to achieve this is to use the idiomatic words, the "proper" words for something, in context. Good writing will allow the reader to pick up enough of the meaning from this context."

How exactly is "orally" not a "lay term", by the way? It's a very common term. It's patronizing to our readers to assume they don't know such a simple word.

I feel very strongly about this. Copying from my user page: "I'm very concerned by the way Wikipedia articles related to medicine are being dumbed-down. People looking for simplified medical information have plenty of other online resources available. Changing things like "intravenous" to "injection into a vein" or "myocarditis" to "inflammation of the heart" is just plain patronizing. (The latter example could even cause potentially dangerous confusions as "inflammation of the heart" could also conceivably refer to conditions other than myocarditis, such as endocarditis or pericarditis.)

Some editors have even changed a word so common as "orally" to "by mouth"! People who don't know the meanings of words such as "intravenous" and "orally" probably aren't reading Wikipedia to begin with, but even if they are, then they can simply click the word to go to an article about it and find out what it means. Such simplified wording may be appropriate for Simple English Wikipedia, but there is no good reason to do this on the regular English version of Wikipedia, and countless reasons not to.

If you treat people dumb, then they will stay dumb, and nothing good can come from keeping people ignorant. Let's please keep Wikipedia a place to expand knowledge, and not a place to limit it. No other sections of Wikipedia seem to be subjected to this phenomenon of intentionally being dumbed-down, and, if anything, medical-related articles should be the last to be butchered like this."

If you still object, can you please tell me why? I thought that a good compromise was to provide the "real term" along with the "dummy terms", which is what I did. What harm is there in that? The "technical term" (I contend that "orally" is not a "technical term") is there for 99% of our readers, and the "lay term" (by mouth) is there for the 1% who don't know the meaning of "orally". Vontheri (talk) 11:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Please take the discussion to WT:MED for discussion and consensus. --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 17:22, 8 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Okay, I've made a post there. Vontheri (talk) 09:25, 10 July 2023 (UTC)