Police discovered a half dozen bottles of medication in Whitney Houston's room, TMZ reported, adding that family members said Houston had been taking the prescription drug Xanax, which is often used to treat anxiety.

When combined with alcohol, Xanax can cause drowsiness. Houston was reportedly found in her bathtub. A TMZ report this afternoon states that the "singer did not die from drowning but rather from what appears to be a combination of Xanax and other prescription drugs mixed with alcohol ... this according to family sources.

No alcohol was found in the preliminary sweep of Houston's room, TMZ earlier had reported, but there were multiple reports that Houston had been drinking with friends the night before at the hotel.

What is Xanax?

The anti-anxiety drug Xanax (generic alprazolam), also called a minor tranquilizer, benzodiazepine, or sedative hypnotic, is associated with physical dependence. Addiction can occur after 14 days of regular use. Side effects can include violence, excessive sedation, decreased attention, and amnesia. After a person stops taking Xanax, it takes the brain 6 to 18 months to recover. Drug experts say that Xanax is more addictive than most illegal drugs, including cocaine or heroin, and once someone is hooked, getting off it can be a tortuous and even deadly experience.

Focusing on the drug, evil as it is, hides the real problem. The real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life's problems and anxieties as an "illness", and stigmatize unwanted behavior as "diseases." Psychiatry's stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of "mental disorders" are a hoax - unscientific, fraudulent and harmful.

Some doctor prescribed the Xanax and is not being held accountable.

Pressures of success

Psychiatry has a long history of attacking and harming artists.

Artists are the individuals who dream our future and create the realities of tomorrow. It is the artist who lifts the spirit, makes us laugh and cry and can even shape the spiritual future of our culture. It is artists who make life. Artists are cherished human assets the world over.

Unfortunately, in many cases, they are assets we have lost too soon - losses that have left us poorer. In recent decades we have all mourned the untimely deaths of great artists who enriched our lives, yet left before their work was done. Luminaries of literature, the screen, the theater and the concert stage, names such as Ernest Hemingway, Frances renowned writer Antonin Artaud, jazz singer Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence, Phil Hartman and many, many more. And now, Whitney Houston.

Faced with even this partial list, it would be easy to form the impression that the lives of artists are unavoidably tumultuous and that for some, the pressures of success bring demands too great to be borne. It would also be easy to believe that to be a successful artist you must be neurotic or some sort of tragic figure.

Consider that each of these great artists and many of the others who have left us were offered "help." Instead they were betrayed and placed on a path which assured their destruction. This betrayal came through the direct or indirect influence of psychiatrists or psychologists, who claimed they would help but were, in effect, a destructive influence that left these artists dreadfully damaged - or dead - after their foundations of strength and certainty were torn away.

Today there is an added urgency that this message be heard and understood, for the assault upon artists of every genre has only increased in both volume and efficiency. The weapons now include an array of deadly drugs that masquerade as therapeutic cures, just as the pre-frontal lobotomy once did. In Hollywood, the mecca of the entertainment industry, those mind-altering and addictive psychotropic drugs are exacting too high a cost in creative lives.

Go Back