I have the 'itch' to make a poll, so I thought up this quandary. Most of the people in this subforum take or have taken a benzodiazepine at some point in their recent life. If you haven't, good for you. They are not fun IMO. But that is the quandary! They aren't really 'recreational' but we all still come back to them. Most of the drugs we love work by somehow stimulating post-synaptic Dopamine receptors in the Nucleus Accumbens (the mid-brain), which leads to primal euphoria. Some of our other favorite drugs, like psychedelics notably, work by exciting the Cerebral Cortex through release of Glutamate via 5-HT2A receptors. But benzodiazepines don't do either. All they do is to increase the potency of a transmitter called GABA. This transmitter is a dull one - it just 'turns down the volume' of other transmitters. So benzo's just are a broad-spectrum 'down button'. So even 'fun' transmitters like Dopamine, are turned down. But they decrease anxiety and hyper-excitability. That is why people use them so much. Just in case you didn't realize what a benzo was, they include: Xanax (alprazolam), Klonopin (clonazepam), Valium (diazepam), Ativan (lorazepam), and anything ending in "-pam" basically... So why do you take them, primarily? Post your reply and/or use the POLL.
