Pill presses, Instagram flexes and Xanax excesses: The risky culture around benzos (Part 1)
Thursday, 1 April, 2025.
A mix of benzos - Valium (diazepam) and Klonopin (clonazepam). Photo courtesy: anonymous.
Note: this article is part one in a two-part series on benzos. It’s also a long one. We’ve pieced together a series of stories from peers with benzo experience. If you’re short on time or your attention span isn’t great, we suggest you dip in and out as it suits you. You can navigate through the article using the subheadings.
The first time Ben took a suspect Xanax, likely a fake, he was working at McDonalds at the time. He had the self-awareness to call in sick that day.
Temporarily freed from the hectic low-pay job, he decided to neck a couple of VB longnecks in the car on the way home, while a friend drove. As the effects of the pill washed over him like bubbling water in a jacuzzi, sedating him and blurring his vision, he realised he was hungry, so the pair stopped at a Maccas. It wasn’t just any Maccas though. It was the exact one where Ben worked. At this stage, Ben was so zonked that he completely forgot he’d called in sick… Until he saw his manager at the drive-through window.
“You can imagine the awkwardness that ensued,” Ben says.
“Shortly after that I blacked out and awoke in a house I’d never seen before, collected my items and caught a bus home, hoping that my car was there.”
Losing memories and behaving chaotically is a frighteningly common experience for young people who use non-prescribed Xanax. But it’s not just xannies people are popping. There’s a whole alphabet soup out there of drugs with similar effects. These are the “-pams”: diazepam, nitrazepam, clonazepam, oxazepam, to name a few. We call this drug group “benzodiazepines”, aka benzos.
They’re surging in popularity and it doesn’t matter these days if you have a prescription. They’re everywhere and people aren’t just selling off their prescribed meds. There’s a huge underground fake benzo market. People make them look identical or similar to the official pharmaceutical products by putting them through pill presses, both here within Australia and overseas. Now, they’re an increasing part of Australia’s overdose death statistics.
Ben is really careful with benzos, such as Xanax, these days. He usually only uses them to kill off a really unpleasant psychedelic trip or to deal with a comedown or hangover. He recognises that you can quickly get “lost in the sauce” if you use them too frequently.
“Strong short-acting benzos are some of the most addictive drugs I’ve tried,” he warns.
So what exactly are benzos? And how can you use them safely?
What are benzos?
Benzodiazepines are medications intended to treat anxiety, insomnia, epilepsy and alcohol withdrawal. They’re also sometimes used in hospitals to sedate people before an operation. They vary widely in dosage and strength.
In Australia, you need a prescription to buy any benzo legally.
A short history of benzos in Australia
Benzos have been around for a long while. Doctors in Australia began to liberally prescribe patients benzos in the 60s, and people have gobbled them up with or without scripts since then. In 1986, Australia’s first support service for benzo dependence, Tranx, opened. After this, health authorities quickly realised these drugs were causing people serious problems, which resulted in public awareness campaigns and a huge decrease in benzo prescriptions.
In the last 15 years, however, there has been renewed interest in these drugs and it’s coincided with the mass-manufacturing of non-pharmaceutical grade (fake) benzo tablets.
Benzos really (re)burst onto the underground drug scene in the 2010s when rappers, such as Yung Lean, Future and Lil Peep, began to dedicate entire verses to dissociative downer drugs like Xanax. It simultaneously prompted a global craze for benzos and pioneered a hip hop genre defined by laid-back trap beats and mumbled nihilistic lyrics. In the rap world, it suddenly became cooler to be a drug user, to be someone dependent on xannies, someone embracing the sheer meaningless of life, than a drug seller and a hustler. This contrasted starkly with the Golden Era of hip hop in the 90s, which platformed drug dealing as a badge of authenticity and political staunchness as a form of empowerment.
As a teenager in high school, Lyndon became fascinated with benzos as a result of their glorification in mainstream pop culture. He spent hours trawling through Reddit threads, reading up on these brick-like pills. When they arrived in Australia en masse around 2015 or 2016, he jumped on the trend. Since then, the popularity of these drugs has rapidly surged. An ABC report from earlier this year suggested that the use of non-prescribed Xanax among young people in Australia is exploding.
Lyndon has now used benzos daily for a number of years, but he says that he’s always careful to monitor his use. It’s usually just one pill a day.
He falls into the drug nerd category, rather than the category of users dependent on these drugs. Even though he usually bulk-buys benzos, he tells Users News he’s only taken a bunch of benzos at once to intentionally black out as “an experiment” one time. He’s a psychonaut who enjoys exploring his own inner mind, who uses drugs to experience something new. His voice crescendos on the phone when he describes the different shapes to various benzo pills, the different boxes, bottles and colours. He states that he has a “little museum of benzos” at home. Like a stamp collector, he’s obsessed with finding rare examples and he has an encyclopaedic knowledge.
He says he tends to use Klonopin (clonazepam) these days, non-prescribed, because they help him on a day-to-day basis. As a musician running a record label, he has to talk to people internationally a lot and the pills help expand his social battery.
“I like that they allow me to function without intrusive thoughts. But they also don’t completely take things out of my brain where I am no longer myself.”
The back and front of a Klonopin (clonazepam) pill, bought from a friend with a prescription, meaning this is the official prescribed medication. Photo courtesy: anonymous.
But he warns that benzos have seriously harmed the lives of some people around him due to the addictive potential.
“I’ve seen many friends fall down that hole and really push things. I’ve had friends go to rehab 5 times [due to benzo use] and I’m aware of one person in my social circles dying who was heavily addicted to them.”
It’s important at this point to make a distinction between different kinds of benzos. Due to the strength variability between different benzos, it’s like comparing apples and oranges sometimes. It’s like the difference between snorting ice and injecting it. Lyndon says these contrasts “cannot be overstated”.
“One benzo is not like another,” he quips.
The consensus among the peers consulted for this article is that the shorter-lasting benzos, such as Xanax (alprazolam), are the most addictive because they hit you quickly, hard and for a short time. Xanax is a lot stronger than other benzos like Valium (diazepam) and Klonopin (clonazepam). In fact, estimations suggest that Xanax is 20 times stronger than Valium of the same weight. Rather than a slow release, Xanax will sedate you instantly. As a result of the calming effect, many people don’t realise quite how inebriated they are, leading to them taking more and more in quick succession. Lyndon says he’s seen this lead to “really careless and reckless behaviour” by some heavy xannie users.
Benzo dependence comes with serious withdrawal symptoms
Benzo dependence is really serious because there are a whole lot of physical withdrawal symptoms which mean you have to wean off the drugs slowly.
Mel, who went to rehab for her benzo use in 2023, emphasises the intensity of the withdrawal symptoms.
“The whole mental side of trying to learn to live and deal with bad thoughts without using benzos was obviously really tough but what my body went through was also really tough,” she says. “I’ve withdrawn from other drugs like opioids and Lyrica (pregabalin) in the past. They also put my body through hell. But nothing for me has compared to benzos. It felt like my brain was a toaster in a bathtub most of the time.”
Like many people whose bodies suffer after prolonged benzo use, Mel had regular cold sweats and shakes. She even experienced seizures while fluctuating between periods of sobriety and relapsing. At the time, she had no idea that benzo withdrawal increases the risk of seizure. She also didn’t know that it helps to taper off use slowly. She says that a lot of benzo users she’s encountered are also unaware of these risks
Of course, weaning off benzos can be really hard when you’re accessing it illegally. You never know when you’ll run out and when there’ll be a supply shortage. Furthermore, you can’t be sure the drug is actually what you expect and that the dosage you’ve been told is correct.
Furthermore, when it comes to Xanax specifically, you’re almost certainly buying fake pills. Doctors and psychiatrists prescribe Xanax to very few people at all in Australia. It’s a drug of last resort, closely monitored by health authorities and only given to people medicinally to curb the frequency and intensity of panic disorders. With a burgeoning black market for xannies, you’ll find all the usual issues with illicit drug markets – unexpected harmful drugs, unsafe cutting agents and unpredictable purity.
“Realistically, unless you have a magical plug from outer space that is somehow getting them into Australia, you don’t know what you’re getting,” Lyndon asserts. “Real xans are extremely rare and hard to find.”
Our tips for buying benzos from the black market
If you feel comfortable, ask your dealer about where they sourced their benzo pills and for photographic evidence of the pills themselves. It’s not always the case but it can be quite obvious sometimes if a pill is fake, so do your research beforehand. There are some great Reddit threads with crowd-sourced knowledge from benzo enthusiasts. It’s also worth checking to see if NSW Health has issued any drug alerts about fake benzo pills. If your dealer can show you they’re from the official blister pack or bottle, that’s generally a good sign, although it’s still not foolproof. Just make sure you’re not asking for the details of their plug as a lot of dealers will get touchy about you treading on their toes like that.
Ben advises that pills in blister packs (Valium, for example) are much harder to fake than benzos in script bottles, even though the latter may look legit at first glance.
“All benzos I’ve gotten in bottles have been obvious represses, as in they completely crumbled if you looked at them wrong or they just had super dodgy pressing errors,” Ben says. “I’ve had KALMA pills be in pieces before I even cracked the seal and more recently 10mg diazepam pills that had so much blue dye in them that they would stain my tongue like I sucked pen ink through a straw.”
Some dealers will send proof their benzos are legit without you asking, as most people who use and sell these drugs are aware of the dangers of the fake benzo market. But other dealers simply don’t care and may lie to you. Always use caution.
If you’re buying your benzos from a dealer or the dark web, you need to be careful. Counterfeit benzo tablets seem to be one of the most common drug groups prompting public drug alerts in Australia. Health authorities have tested knock-off benzo tablets that contain a range of different substances including nitazenes, a family of lab-made drugs with heroin-like effects, only far far stronger. Very scary stuff!
Street benzos can also be really high-strength, stronger than their legal prescribed counterparts, leaving people who take them susceptible to dependency.
If you’re unsure about the quality of the benzo you have, it’s worth taking the drug to a legal drug testing facility. There is currently a fixed-site drug checking service in Canberra and mobile drug checking services at some music festivals in Victoria and NSW.
Of course, many people still don’t have such a service on their doorstep. But you can use fentanyl and nitazene testing kits at home to make sure your benzos won’t send you to an early grave, and there are even benzo testing strips out there. They’re cheap and they may save lives.
Young people and the risk-taking culture behind benzo use
The problem with benzos is that a lot of young teenagers get into them, often before they get into other drugs. In part, the saturation of drooling xanned-up rappers on social media has spurred interest in these drugs from young impressionable fans. But their status as a medicine and their easy accessibility has also meant that teenagers across Australia see them as relatively harmless.
As journalist Hannah Ewens wrote for Vice back in 2018, this specific corner of sesh culture is often showy. For gen Zs it can be all about monologuing into a phone camera, imitating American slang, calling out the haters online and posting photos to Instagram of bars on their tongues on a night out. This (sometimes livestreamed) behaviour is both a piss-take and a flex. It’s probably not the most mature drug culture but it’s intimately tied to youth and it’s equal parts nihilism, banter and bravado. While there’s definite stigma associating with taking these drugs, many young people relish and feed off the attention, embracing an outsider status. So, if you’ve ever wondered why that kid on Instagram posted a borderline nonsensical rant at 4 AM Sunday morning, slurring their words, it’s possible benzos are part of the reason.
Of course, this is not to say that all people who take benzos mirror this behaviour . But there is a subculture within benzo-enthusiast communities that glorifies this bravado.
The downside to this culture is the competitive aspect. A lot of people want to show how tough they are by chugging back benzos. They want to see how many substances they can get away with taking in a party setting. Mixing drugs is therefore really common for this particular community. But people often just end up really sloppy, and with a drug dependency to boot.
Mixing benzos with downer drugs like ket and alcohol just amplifies the effects of all these drugs. It means you can get drunk way quicker, which is why a lot of people drink on benzos, but this can also spiral out of control very quickly.
The drugs to avoid on benzos
Downer drugs tend to mix really poorly with benzos. Sure, you can probably get away with popping a couple of Valiums and drinking a pint at the pub over a couple of hours without any repercussions. But, if you do large amounts of downer drugs together, you can end up in really serious trouble and overdose and die.
GHB and opioids, such as heroin, are an especially dangerous mix with benzos in your system. Both GHB and heroin already have a strong potential for overdose if you’re not careful. With benzos in your body, that risk increases.
Benzos and alcohol can lead you to blacking out and losing memory quickly.
Benzos and ket also amplify the effects of each other, getting you cooked really quickly. The same overdose risk applies to this combo as to the others.
Mixing benzos with medications that make you drowsy, such as antipsychotics (e.g: Seroquel) and antihistamines (e.g: Phenergan), is going to make you super sleepy because all these drugs have that same effect. Never, under any circumstances, drive a vehicle if you’ve recently taken this drug combo.
Beware the black outs
“You have no inhibitions and you may black out,” Mel warns.
It’s an especially important recognition for the women and trans folk out there using benzos. Media reports and academic studies have long pinpointed benzos as a particular drug of concern when it comes to drink spiking, drug-facilitated sexual assault and robbery.
Mel advises that people only take benzos in locations where they feel safe. Even better, it’s worth having a plan of action for a big night ahead and safeguards in place, in case things go sideways. Of course, this is easier said than done. In fact, Mel often took benzos whenever and wherever she could with little thought for the possible ramifications. But she wants other to learn from her experiences.
The fun side to benzos and assessing the overall risks
News reports and health messaging rarely recognise the fact that illegal drugs are often really fun. Yes, benzos can be dangerous and addictive. But we can’t write any story about benzos without also recognising that they do have huge health benefits for certain people and many others use them responsibility to have fun and connect with the people around them.
While Mel is frank about having a substance use disorder linked to benzos, she also says these drugs “really helped” her get through tough periods of her life, and she did obtain occasional scripts from doctors for benzos. Her story doesn’t fit into any of the neat categories journalists tend to use for people who use drugs. She’s used benzos recreationally, she’s taken them medicinally and at other times she’s binged on them to escape her reality.
“Even though it got to a point where I had to get off them and there was no safe level of use for me, there was a long time where they had massive therapeutic value to me,” she states.
“They also helped me tap into my creativity. I was studying creative writing at uni for a while and, as someone who struggles to start things due to anxiety and perfectionism, benzos helped me beat writer’s block. They were very freeing.”
So, if you’re diving into the world of benzos, it’s important you make an informed decision, you’re aware of your own habits and vulnerabilities, you monitor your own use and you listen to what people close to you are telling you about your drug habits.
Know your drugs: Benzo nicknames
Benzos go by a tonne of different names. You may also hear people refer generally to benzos as “tranquilisers”, “sleeping pills” or “downers”. When it comes to individual benzos though, the slang goes deep. Here’s a quick guide so you know what you’re getting.
Alprazolam: Xanax (brand name), Kalma (brand name), Mylan (brand name), A2s, xans, xannies, bars, bricks. “Crowns” refer to alprazolam pills produced by Kalma with an indented crown-like appearance. Kalma recently moved away from the Xanax-like bar design, likely as a result of the frequency of fake Xanax presses across the globe.
Diazepam: Antenex (brand name), APO (brand name), Valium (brand name), vals, vallies. “Blue dreams” refers to 10 milligram diazepam pills which usually come from South-East Asia (Indonesia and Thailand). Most Valium pills prescribed in Australia are 5 milligrams.
Clonazepam: Paxam (brand name), Klonopin (brand name), K-pins, klons/clons.
Flunitrazepam: Rohypnol, roofies.
Lorazepam: Ativan (brand name)
Oxazepam: Serepax (brand name), serras.