| Kenneth Morford raised an eyebrow in the final minutes of the season premiere of The White Lotus, when Parker Posey, with the lilt of a Carolina aristocrat, told her husband, "Don't worry — I took a lorazepam." That's because Morford, a physician at Yale Medicine specializing in addiction treatment, has been disappointed by media depictions of drug use in the past. (Just ask him about Euphoria.) And lorazepam, the generic name for Ativan, is part of a class of fast-acting tranquilizers called benzodiazepines whose widespread misuse can lead people to forming dangerous dependencies with long-term consequences.  Parker Posey as Victoria Ratliff in Season 3 of The White Lotus. Source: HBO "When she starts to talk about needing her lorazepam to calm down, I thought, 'Oh, this is fitting that kind of phenotype,'" Morford said. Benzodiazepines, or benzos, have been prescribed for decades to treat anxiety, panic attacks and insomnia. The most commonly used is alprazolam, better known as Xanax. They're meant to be taken sparingly and for just weeks at a time, as misuse can cause patients to develop a tolerance and eventually form a physical dependence that can be life-threatening. "Medications like this can take over people's lives," said Tolani Ajagbe, a psychiatrist at SUNY Upstate University Hospital who specializes in addiction. "They cannot function without it. Then you need higher doses to feel comfortable, and it just gets out of hand." The risks of overuse have long been known (the Rolling Stones released a song about this in 1966), but for years physicians over-prescribed benzos, signed off on escalating doses to counteract tolerance and carelessly refilled prescriptions. The rate of benzo-related overdose deaths more than quadrupled from 1996 to 2013, according to one study. The vast majority of deaths resulted from people mixing their prescription tranquilizers with opioids, according to a Center for Disease Control and Prevention analysis. The conversation started to shift in the aftermath of the opioid crisis, Morford said, which spurred a widespread reexamination of prescribing habits. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration put its strongest safety warning on benzos, advising physicians of the serious risks of overuse and dependency. Doctors have become more cautious about how they administer the drugs, said Joseph Squitieri, a psychiatrist at Northwell Health in New York. And there's evidence things are getting better. According to the latest data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, about 24 million Americans take a benzo of some type, and roughly 15% of those people use the drugs outside of a doctor's direction. Those numbers are down from 2016, when some 30 million adults reported benzo use and 17% said they were misusing them. Back to The White Lotus, addiction specialists said watching the show each week is an exercise in ticking the boxes of disordered benzo use, as Posey's character, Victoria Ratliff, exhibits all the hallmarks of dependency. "If Parker Posey was my patient and I determined that the risk of the lorazepam is outweighing any benefits she's getting from it, I'd try to taper her off of them," Morford said. "And then you have to treat the underlying problem." We'll hear more on that, I assume, when the season finale airs on HBO Sunday night. — Damian Garde | 
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