I advise a lot of caution when reading articles like this. This is more of an opinion piece or stream of consciousness writing style, even though it’s presented as if it was well researched authoritative material.

The article starts with buzzword bingo for topics that appeal to a certain group: Trauma, drugs, capitalism is to blame for our pain, and so on.

The sections describing the drugs will make anyone familiar with basic pharmacology groan. Meprobomate isn’t a drug with unknown action like he claims. It’s a GABA-A agonist with adenosine reuptake inhibition activity. When we say it isn’t fully understood we mean there’s more to it, but that’s the case for literally every drug. This person has misunderstood that as if don’t know how it works at all.

The sections about GABA are also full of similar mistakes. Benzos don’t “flood your brain with GABA”. They bind to part of the receptor that modulates its activity. We switched to them because they are much better in overdose relative to older drugs.

The author’s drug use is also in an unfortunate pattern. Modern prescribing practices only suggest benzos for short term situational use. They are not a primary treatment for chronic anxiety and they do not address psychological issues. SSRIs, buspirone, and therapy techniques are indicated for long term treatment, not benzos. Benzos are also not good for sleep quality even though a high dose can help someone get to sleep. The number of issues with the treatment described in this article is large, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets misled into thinking this is normal psychiatric practice. These days most doctors are hesitant to prescribe benzos at all because many patients want them and can start abandoning the better long-term treatments while they seek more benzos (a strategy that doesn’t work, as this author sadly discovered).

There is also an undertone of “America bad” in the article (not surprising for an article that opens by blaming capitalism for all of our suffering) but many would be surprised to learn that benzos are currently far easier to acquire in many other countries. France has some eye-popping numbers of benzo prescriptions across the population right now, whereas you’re going to have a hard time walking into an American doctor’s office and getting a benzo prescription (there are exceptions, of course).

Take a heavy dose of benzos and you will look superficially like you're asleep, someone might try to rouse you and be unable to do it.

My take on benzos is that by binding to the receptors it does it opens up ion channels that drain the electricity out of your associative networks, suppressing just about everything.

Sleep it turns out is a structured state of unconsciousness and the EEG will show the person "sleeping" under the influence of beznos isn't actually asleep but they're unresponsive and amnesiac so they think they slept and so did onlookers.