All Intensive Purposes

Today's New York Times reports on the disturbing side effects of Ambien:

The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug's users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands.

A spokesperson for the company that makes Ambien "cautioned that every case reported in patients taking Ambien might not necessarily be caused by the drug." Well, that's reassuring.

No cause has been found for sleep-related eating disorder, but Dr. Schenck says he believed that it happened when the brain confuses two basic instincts: sleeping and eating. "Those two become linked," he said. "In the sleep stage you eat. I think two instinctual behaviors become intertwined."

That sounds like comic-book science.