This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Council on Scientific Affairs

JAMA. 1981;245(7):749-750.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

IN 1977 an expert panel of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) addressed the question of whether short-acting barbiturates were too often being abused or misused, were contributing to a high rate of suicides, were too readily available on prescription, and should perhaps be moved from class II of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to class I.¹ This committee concluded that there was no good evidence to suggest that any new regulatory action should be taken against these barbiturates. It did suggest that benzodiazepines were perhaps preferable to barbiturates as hypnotics, because of a wider margin of safety, but concluded that hypnotics had an important place in clinical practice that did not deserve to be truncated because of their possible abuse potential.

In 1979 another expert committee on the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) again reviewed these issues and others in a more detailed report, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association, Chicago.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association, 535 N Dearborn St, Chicago, IL 60610 (Richard J. Jones, MD).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?