"Nicks is hoping to get time to work on another solo album."

[louielouie2000]

Originally Posted by HejiraNYC

I have to say that the ignorance in this thread is stunning, even for the Ledge. This notion that people are solely responsible for their own medication decisions is ludicrous and that physicians are not culpable for medication errors is completely false. If that were true, why even bother going to a physician? Why bother controlling access to medication with prescriptions? Let's just make it a drug free-for-all; every man/woman/child should diagnose their own illnesses and medicate themselves accordingly.

In the case of Stevie's addiction to Klonopin, a little insight is needed. Firstly, the science of addiction medicine was relatively young at the time, and even today there is a very high relapse rate and little in the way of effective FDA-approved treatments for addiction. In the absence of treatment options, Klonopin was prescribed off-label at the discretion of Stevie's physician, presumably with the rationale that its tranquilizing/anti-anxiety effects may help to blunt her urges to resume cocaine use. As a so-called expert in his field, Stevie probably trusted him with her life. Another thing to keep in mind is that access to drug information before the internet was virtually non-existent. At best, as a patient you would be lucky to get a wadded-up string of paper containing a disorganized list of side effects in 5pt font. Unless you had a medical background, it was basically impossible to discern 75% of it. As a result, the patient basically had no choice but to heed the advice of the physician and the instructions for use on the bottle. Were there side effects of chronic high-dose Klonopin use? Of course! But at the time, very few people in Stevie's inner circle probably knew about her medication regimen. They probably attributed her flat affect, weight gain and chronic fatigue to age, the lingering effects of cocaine/alcohol abuse, heavy marijuana use, Epstein-Barr, etc. I'm sure people worried about her, but it probably took a long time for them to connect the dots back to the physician prescribing this "anti-addiction medication."

I think you are pretty spot-on with all of this (per usual!). However, there is one factor you're missing. Since Stevie had already gone to rehab for cocaine, she had to of realized at some point that she had replaced one addiction with another.

Also, the summation that prescription drugs were not recognized as addictive or used recreationally in the 1980s & 1990s is incorrect. Quaaludes were pulled from the US market in 1982 because they were both of these things.