Free Republic

The “Breaking Bad” grandma accused of running an international drug ring out of her California home is living life “as if nothing has happened,” and doesn’t even have an ankle monitor, pictures taken by The Post show. Joanne Segovia, 64, has been out on bail since charged with allegedly leading a double life dealing drugs, including deadly fentanyl, while working as the executive director for the San Jose Police Officers’ Association in March. Despite facing up to 20 years in prison, Segovia can be seen smiling and cheering at a park where she watched her grandson’s Little League game over...

WHITE PLAINS, NY — Even if Kerry Kennedy accidentally drugged herself with a sleeping pill before getting in her car, she broke the law if she kept driving after feeling the drug’s effects, prosecutors say. In filings Tuesday, the Westchester County district attorney’s office asked a judge to reject Kennedy’s second attempt to have her drugged-driving case dismissed. Prosecutors said a dismissal would send the wrong message to the public about how “people of wealth and power” are treated. Kennedy is the ex-wife of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the daughter of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the niece of...

New evidence has linked a commonly prescribed sleep medication with bizarre behaviours, including a case in which a woman painted her front door in her sleep. UK and Australian health agencies have released information about 240 cases of odd occurrences, including sleepwalking, amnesia and hallucinations among people taking the drug zolpidem. While doctors say that zolpidem can offer much-needed relief for people with sleep disorders, they caution that these newly reported cases should prompt a closer look at its possible side effects.

A judge has rejected a family's plea that a 53-year-old woman in a vegetative state should be allowed to die. He has ordered instead that she should be given a drug that could wake her up. Theoretically the patient could then spend the rest of her life severely disabled and aware of her condition. Sir Mark Potter, president of the High Court Family Division, says the woman should be given zolpidem, a common sleeping pill. It has been used before on victims of severe brain damage who have then regained consciousness. The woman, who cannot be named, suffered a massive...

Perhaps the last word should go to Pat Flores, the mother of George Melendez, the 31-year-old coma patient who reassured his parents that he wasn't in pain after taking Ambien, as zolpidem is known in the US. He was starved of oxygen when his car overturned and he landed face down in a garden pond near his home in Houston, Texas, in 1998. "The doctors said he was clinically dead - one said he was a vegetable," says Pat. "After three weeks he suffered multi-organ failure and they said his body would ultimately succumb. They said he would never regain...

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? ...For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his...

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these 'strange and wonderful' rebirths For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his...

Responding to reports of a drug that can temporarily revive people diagnosed in a permanent vegetative state, the foundation run by the family of Terri Schiavo is calling for a moratorium on removal of care for people in such a condition. The Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation points out South African researchers claim Zolpidem, used to treat insomnia, appears to be effective in restoring some brain function to patients previously determined to be in a persistent vegetative state, or PVS. The researchers examined the effects on three patients of using the drug for up to six years and found all "were...

Close window Published online: 23 May 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060522-9 Sleeping pills offer wake-up call to vegetative patients Drug could overcome brain shutdown caused by trauma.Michael Hopkin Clinical researchers have discovered that they can rouse semi-comatose patients by giving them, bizarrely, a common sleeping drug. If more wide-ranging tests are successful, the drug could become the first effective treatment for 'persistent vegetative state', the condition at the centre of the US legal battle over sufferer Terri Schiavo last year. British and South African doctors have reported the cases of three semi-comatose patients who were revived for several hours at a...

The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug's users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands. The next morning, the night eaters remember nothing about their foraging. But they wake up to find telltale clues: mouthfuls of peanut butter, Tostitos in their beds, kitchen counters overflowing with flour, missing food, and even lighted ovens and stoves. Some are so embarrassed, they delay telling anyone, even as they gain weight. "These people...

Americans are about to be reminded again how much they need sleep — and sleeping pills. A new effort appears to be developing to expand the use of sleeping pills, which because of their potential for abuse have long had a reputation as being in some ways more dangerous than the insomnia they are meant to treat. Some sleep experts say newer pills are safer than the ones that once caused deaths from overdose. Moreover, some say, there is growing evidence that insomnia is a serious medical condition, not just a nuisance. "Slowly, we are beginning to identify that insomnia...