The FDA’s War Against Sleep

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One of the key themes I’ve tried to illustrate in my writings is that chronic illness has vastly increased over the last 150 years. A major cause of this is the disruption of the natural rhythms essential for our body’s self-regulation and self-repair.

Modern Medicine (Allopathy) often overlooks this concept because it doesn’t recognize the innate health of the body. Allopathic treatments focus on stabilizing or altering the body (e.g., ICU care or surgery) and hoping it heals itself, unlike other medical systems that enhance the body’s natural recovery capacity.

Typically, Allopathy excels with acute conditions, while a health-augmenting approach is better for chronic illnesses, an area where Allopathy often falls short. Here are three reasons why the Allopathic model dominates:

  1. Economic Incentives: The Allopathic model creates many expensive treatments and diagnostics, making it highly profitable and incentivizing its dominance in the medical market.
  2. Cultural Psychology: Our culture’s need to control and understand everything leads to methods that dominate nature rather than work harmoniously with it, opposing the philosophy of trusting the body’s natural healing.
  3. Research Bias: Medical research favors treatments that show immediate, observable changes (like lowering blood pressure) rather than those that promote gradual, long-term recovery, skewing the focus towards pharmaceutical interventions.

The Impact of Natural Rhythms on Health

The health of the body relies heavily on the normal functioning of self-regulating cycles:

  • Breathing: Slow, smooth, nasal breathing profoundly impacts health and longevity by regulating many critical physiological functions.
  • Sunlight: Regular exposure to sunlight is vital for health, and its absence doubles the risk of mortality and can lead to conditions like depression or cancer.
  • Physical Activity: Regular exercise is crucial, and a sedentary lifestyle leads to significant health issues. Those who walk daily often experience dramatically improved longevity.
  • Mental Rest: The mind needs to alternate between rest and activity, but modern life often forces constant thinking and stress.

In short, many of the natural rhythms our bodies rely upon for self-regulation are heavily disrupted in modern society, which in turn results in a variety of consistent derangements to normal physiology that are now seen throughout the population.

The Importance of Sleep

Throughout my career, I’ve met many integrative practitioners who emphasize normalizing their patient’s sleep as a crucial step in treating chronic illness. Sleep is a foundational process for restoring health, yet patients with chronic illnesses often suffer from disrupted sleep cycles, which can be challenging to correct.

Sleep is a tightly regulated cycle, highly responsive to environmental signals and essential for maintaining other critical body rhythms. During sleep, the body cycles through different phases, each with critical functions: deep NREM sleep heals the brain and drains toxins, while REM sleep consolidates memories and processes emotions.

A typical sleep cycle goes as follows:

Note: since REM sleep predominates later at night, not sleeping long enough disproportionately disrupts REM sleep. NREM sleep is responsible for eliminating unnecessary memories, whereas REM sleep processes the day’s experiences and reinforces them into long-term memory.

Matthew Walker is one of the world’s most vocal sleep researchers. In his book Why We Sleep, he argues that sleep serves several vital functions, including:

Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.

Even when controlling for factors such as body mass index, gender, race, history of smoking, frequency of exercise, and medications, the lower an older individual’s sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk, the worse their physical health, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, the less energy they report, and the lower their cognitive function, typified by forgetfulness.

The Sleep Crisis

Adequate sleep requires:

  1. Sufficient time set aside for sleep.
  2. Ability to fall asleep quickly.
  3. Cycling through all sleep phases once asleep.

Adults generally need 7-9 hours per night, with infants and children needing more. Unfortunately, many people don’t get enough sleep, contributing to widespread health issues.

Key Points:

  • Gallup poll 57% of Americans want more sleep; only 42% get enough.
  • 35.5% of American adults sleep less 7 hours per night; 30% have insomnia symptoms.
  • 13.5% of adults feel tired most days; 10 days of 6-hour deficient sleep is equivalent to 24 hours of being awake (no sleep).
  • Sleep Apnea affects 9%-38% of the population.
  • Of the elderly 30-48% have insomnia symptoms; 12-20% have insomnia disorders. Aging reduces sleep efficiency and quality, and increases nighttime awakenings.

Sleeping Pills

Despite a $65 billion annual market for sleep aids in the U.S. and a $432 billion global “sleep economy,” 50-70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders. The pandemic worsened sleep for over half of Americans in 2020, and 76% admitted to buying sleep aids.

The problem lies in the nature of most sleeping pills: they are sedatives, not sleep aids. They sedate the brain, impairing its ability to initiate restorative sleep, leaving users tired and at risk for health issues. Studies have shown that sleeping pill users are significantly more likely to die early and develop cancer. For example, one study found a twofold increase in mortality for sleeping pill users, with another study reporting a 3.6-5.4 times higher death rate for users over 2.5 years, and an increased cancer risk of 7-99%.  This in turn, led the authors to conclude that in 2010, prescription sleeping pills “may have been associated with 320,000-507,000 excess deaths within the USA alone.”

Most prescription sleeping pills, like Ambien, are “sedative hypnotics” similar to benzodiazepines (e.g., Valium), which are addictive and often used long-term despite being intended for short-term use. Over-the-counter options, like Benadryl or Unisom, are antihistamines that also disrupt the sleep cycle. Alcohol, with a similar mechanism to benzodiazepines, is another addictive sedative that inhibits sleep long after being ingested.

Gamma-Hydroxy-Butarate

While most sleeping medications are unsafe and ineffective, one drug, gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), has shown remarkable results. Developed in 1874, GHB was marketed in Europe as an intravenous anesthetic in 1964. Despite its benefits, it wasn’t practical for surgeries but was useful in intensive care due to its unique properties:

  • Slows heart rate without blood pressure loss
  • Doesn’t irritate veins
  • Doesn’t suppress respiratory centers
  • Relaxes muscles
  • Induces sleep without reducing oxygen consumption
  • Protects tissues from injury

Decades of research followed and demonstrated GHB’s extraordinary properties and low toxicity. It metabolizes to succinate and water, has a high LD50, and no deaths have been conclusively attributed to it. GHB is a powerful sleep aid, restoring deep sleep cycles and leaving individuals refreshed—in many cases after just 3-4 hours of sleep.

As more scientists (and then members of the public) began exploring the drug, according to Ward Dean MD (who provided extensive references to support his claims), through decades of research, they found a variety of benefits from GHB including:

  • Dramatically increases growth hormone levels, enhancing strength, stamina, muscle mass, and healing (hence making it very popular with bodybuilders).
  • Effective in treating addictions, particularly opioids, alcohol, and benzodiazepines.
  • Increases dopamine levels, counteracting Parkinson’s disease effects.
  • Aids childbirth by relaxing the mother, dilating the cervix and protecting the fetus (whereas alternatives like opioids endanger the fetus).
  • Acts as an aphrodisiac, enhancing sexual intimacy, performance and female orgasm.
  • Facilitates therapeutic breakthroughs by reducing inhibitions.
  • Has a disinhibiting effect similar to alcohol, but makes individuals friendly rather than aggressive.
  • Temporarily alleviates anxiety without the side effects of benzodiazepines.

Given these remarkable benefits and the decades of research supporting its use, why has no one ever heard of it?

The Ivermectin of Sleep Medicines

The medical industry often uses public relations to create campaigns that generate profits at the expense of public health.

For instance, dermatologists rebranded themselves as skin cancer fighters, spreading hysteria about skin cancer and sunlight dangers. This transformed dermatology into a lucrative field, despite the essential health benefits of sunlight. Similarly, during COVID-19, the FDA downplayed the benefits of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, creating unwarranted fear and blocking their use.

GHB’s story mirrors this pattern. In the early 1990s, as it gained popularity as a supplement (largely due to bodybuilders recognizing the value of it increasing growth hormone in the body), the FDA and CDC publicized adverse reactions to it, despite no fatalities (e.g., hospital doctors misinterpreted the brief deep sleep it created as a coma requiring intubation) . As recounted by Ward Dean M.D., this led to an FDA ban, highly deceptive press releases, and a variety of illegal enforcement actions that were eventually overturned in court.

The FDA then helped create a media hysteria over GHB, fueled by comparisons to Rohypnol (“Roofies”) and made up GHB tragedies, led to its portrayal as a dangerous date-rape drug. This culminated in a 2000 Federal anti-date rape drug law 2000 that made GHB a Schedule I drug, while simultaneously enshrining a pharmaceutical GHB preparation as a Schedule III drug.
Note: to be a schedule I drug, there can be no acceptable medical use for the substance—which is hence irreconcilable with the FDA approved preparation of it being a schedule III drug.

In reality, GHB was rarely involved in sexual assaults and had a distinct easily detectable taste. Misleading media reports and government actions overshadowed the actual data and research. Most remarkably GHB, Rohypnol (Roofies) avoided similar bans due to effective lobbying by its manufacturer, is still a schedule IV drug in America (where it was never brought to market) and remains legal in many countries.

Here, Comedian Jimmy Dore covers the GHB saga in more detail.

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