Why do some sleeping pills claim to be "non-narcotic"?
ambien and lunesta, I believe claim to be non-narcotic. I don't understand, isn't a sleeping pill, by it's very nature, a narcotic?
It this a marketing ploy to play down the dangers of taking sleeping pills? I also noticed they call it a sleeping aid, not a pill, clever wording.
This is a problem in nomenclature. Narcotic by translation from the latin root means sleep-inducing (narcosis). So many different classes of drugs should fall into that category including benzodiazepines, barbituates, opioids, and atypical narcotics like chloral hydrate, GBH, meprobamate, tricyclic antidepressants, and the imidazopyridines like Ambien and Lunesta. However, both the goverment (FDA) and physicians are calling these class of drugs sedative-hypnotics (which I still think is appropriate). But now we come to the nomenclature for narcotics. The government (and to a lesser degree some healthcare professionals) call any controlled substance a narcotic. For example, they will call cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and crystal meth (a synthetic amphetamine) a narcotic whereas all these drugs are stimulants or hallucinogens and have absolutely no sleep-inducing effects. On the contrary, they will prevent the taker from sleeping, but certain people in the medical and legal fields use the term narcotic to describe these drugs. So in your above statement, the term non-narcotic refers more to the fact that these medications are NOT controlled or considered "addictive" or illegal to possess rather than the effect of these medications on the brain. You can be sure that pharmaceutical companies use any and every marketing ploy available, but I believe that this problem in nomenclature started with the government and legal system rather than with the pharmaceutical companies.
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