the benzodiazepine class, all of which share certain features of chemi-
cal structure.
N Ae Na a eh A H
\ ‘ ,Diazepam sectsatea Cl
AlprazolamNote that diazepam, lorazepam (Ativan), and alprazolam (Xanax) all
appear similar in shape.
Librium and Valium were introduced by the same pharmaceutical
company in the 1960s and quickly became, at the time, among the
best-selling drugs in history. As was the case with barbiturates, once
the first benzodiazepines were introduced, other pharmaceutical
companies produced modifications of chemical structure that al-
lowed for independent patenting and sales.
Several other pharmaceutical sedative-hypnotic drugs are sold as
pills for medical use, but not all are barbiturates or benzodiazepines.
These include the older drugs meprobamate (Miltown) and chloral
hydrate and several relatively new drugs used as sleep-inducing (hyp-
notic) agents: zolpidem (Ambien), zaleplon (Sonata), and eszopiclone
(Lunesta).
General anesthetics are another category of sedative-hypnotic used
in medicine. Anesthetics induce loss of sensation. As mentioned in
Chapter 8, local anesthetics do this by weakly interfering with volt-
age-gated sodium channels, which alters the propagation of nerve