I wouldn't say that benzos are dangerous. I would say that they can be dangerous if used improperly. I have used them on and off for 30+ years and have never had any issues. I've also found that lately they are not used that often and most doctors will no longer prescribe them, even psychiatrists.
As for them causing tinnitus, so far Clonazepam has been the only thing that has helped me. Problem is of course that it's not something you should take daily for long term otherwise that's when it can become dangerous. So, I get maybe one or two days a week of relief.
We don't have to agree, but, my viewpoint on this is: they were overprescribed for a long time and then Purdue cooked the golden goose with their illegal opiate marketing which caused a huge crackdown on all controlled prescriptions and now benzos may be underprescribed.
The thing about the use pattern you describe is, with Clonazepam specifically, the half life of the drug is long enough that taking it weekly still leads to having a constant dose in your body, and this has been confirmed by clinical studies which have found Clonazepam metabolites in urine as much as
thirty days after a single dose.
Upshot there is that someone who takes 2 mg a day, like me, probably has more like 5 mg in their body at any given time, and someone who takes 1 mg on a Saturday and a Sunday, will
still have about 0.2mg floating around in their system 5 days later, which is more or less the same as 3-5 mg of Diazepam, which is very much a dose that creates dependence and would need to be tapered off if consumed for long enough.
I am not trying to scare you, as much as, using 1 mg of Clonazepam twice a week is somewhat similar to just taking 0.25 mg every day. If it's more effective for you to use it that way, by all means, I am very much in favor of all of us making whatever reasonable decisions we need to, to have the best life we can with these conditions.
There's also a tremendous and possibly genetically influenced variance in how people respond to these drugs and to withdrawal; some people are able to withdraw from fairly high doses quickly without much fuss, and other people withdraw slowly from lower doses and suffer extremely. There's no way to know what's going to happen until you stop taking it long enough for all of it to have cleared your blood stream, and for long enough that your body's homeostatic response has resolved (6-24 months post withdrawal, for people who have a rough go of it).
Because benzo withdrawal has been
absolute, insane hell for me personally both times I have gone through it over a long, slow taper, I come down hard on the "benzos are super dangerous, last resort kinda thing" side of the argument.
If you talk to one of the people who took a Xanax a day for 3 years, stopped suddenly, had some sweats and insomnia for a week and then they were just fine, they might give you a totally different story and think my story is insane. Neither of us would be wrong or insane, we just had such different experiences with the same basic process that all we could do is compare notes and say "huh, bodies are weird!"
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