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Caffeine, whether in coffee, tea or APC tablets (aspirin, phenacetin, caffeine), taken for a cold, definitely has a stimulating and sleep-postponing effect on a majority of people. But there is a substantial minority on whom, laboratory tests show, it has no effect at all. There are even a few people whom it puts to sleep.
Relax & Enjoy It. Short of the outright sleeping pills, which doctors call hypnotics, there are many drugs that help to bring on sleep, but these also affect different people in different ways. Ironically, some of the best-known pep pills put some people to sleep. Many of the antihistamines, intended to relieve allergies, are also prescribed as soporifics. Virtually all the tranquilizers tend to make falling asleep easier, but their mechanisms vary.
Though sleeplessness, usually dignified by its Latin (and medical) name, insomnia, is now an even commoner complaint than the common cold, few doctors recognize it as a disorder. Lack of sleep, they say, is self-curing, and no one ever died of it. The complaint, "I tossed and turned all night and didn't sleep a wink," is a myth. (Dr. Kleitman has heard it from a man who had just been observed sleeping soundly for seven hours.) The most that these hard-headed doctors will concede is that anxiety about not getting to sleep is itself upsetting, and they will prescribe just a few hypnotics to break a vicious cycle. But most doctors prescribe sleeping pills as freely as aspirin.
Shakespeare's poppy is still around in the form of morphine and its derivatives, plus synthetic substitutes. Mandragora is gone. But the drowsy syrups, and more recently tablets and capsules, have multiplied enormously. By far the most abundantly used and misused are the barbiturates. They come under a hundred names. New, synthetic hypnotics are claimed by their makers to be safer and in some cases surer.
Many doctors doubt these extravagant claims, but the sleep-pill business is booming. The number of prescriptions written for barbiturates is meaningless—too many prescriptions are renewed, in defiance of doctors' orders and federal and state laws, and many prescriptions are forged. Americans spend an estimated $60 million a year, legally or not, on prescription-type sleeping pills. Another $17 million goes for over-the-counter items which, by federal law, must contain none of the potent opiates or barbiturates. After the harried insomniac has spent a few hours in drug-induced sleep, he is likely to wake up heavy-lidded, furry-tongued, with the feeling known as barbiturate hangover. Then he may turn to pep-up pills as an antidote.
Insomniacs who shy away from pills have created a new industry. They can spend up to $480 for a hospital-type bed that cranks up at head and knees, down at the buttocks and feet. For $69.95 they get a gadget, the size of a table radio, that makes white noise—"a scientific blend of all sounds"—to drown out intruding racket. Other machines swish like the restless sea, or, in midwinter, hum like summer's air conditioner. There is a whole catalogue of ear plugs, His and Her reading lights, even a togetherness cigarette holder so that two can smoke in bed.