Fiona Cameron has struggled to get a good night’s sleep for most of her adult life – but none of the medication available in pharmacies helped. <\/p>\n
She turned to Amazon and found a product called Hypno by Bhang, which was described as “herbal sleep aid supplements, for deep restful sleep”. <\/p>\n
They worked, so she bought more. But after a year, she discovered the pills were actually Zopiclone, a prescription drug designed for short-term use. <\/p>\n
In that time Fiona had developed a dependency and she suffered severe withdrawal symptoms when she tried to come off them. <\/p>\n
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulation Agency (MHRA) said it was investigating the products. <\/p>\n
Amazon said it had also launched an investigation and had removed the sleeping pills from its store. <\/p>\n
Fiona, a fiction writer who lives in Castle Douglas, Dumfries and Galloway, spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Your and Yours about her experience. <\/p>\n
She said: “I suffered from insomnia for a very long time – most of my adult life – so I’m always on the look out for anything new.”<\/p>\n
On a good night, she can get four to five hours sleep. <\/p>\n
“But sometimes I just can’t sleep at all, other times I maybe get two or three hours of sleep, so I’m not a good sleeper,” she said. <\/p>\n
Her GP had offered to prescribe Zopiclone for a very short period but she refused and “soldiered on”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fiona Cameron has struggled to get a good night’s sleep for most of her adult life – but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-699800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}