Sleep-Driving

The Post has an interesting story about a potential side effect of Ambien, a popular sleep aid (and one you can purchase inexpensively through one of the twenty oddly-spelled spams in your junk file):

The most prescribed sleep medication in the United States may be linked to episodes of sleepwalking and related strange and dangerous behaviors, experts say — including incidents of nocturnal eating, phone conversations, shoplifting and even driving — of which the subject has no memory.

Sleep specialists and researchers cite a growing though still inconclusive body of reports associating Sanofi-Aventis’s drug Ambien with the incidents. More than 24 million prescriptions for Ambien were written in 2004.

One woman alleges that she ate while sleeping, going from a size 1 to a size 12.  She is now part of a class action suit against the maker, Sanofi-Aventis.