Sleep Pills and Next-Day Weaving

How do scientists actually prove a sleep pill makes you a dangerous driver?

It isn't about counting crashes—it’s about the "weave". Researchers use a gold-standard

metric called SDLP, or the Standard Deviation of Lateral Position. In plain English,

it measures how much your car drifts or "weaves" from side to side while you're driving on

a highway. By using this on-the-road test, they’ve discovered that many common

benzodiazepine sleep aids cause as much next-morning impairment as a blood alcohol concentration of

0.05%. Even if you think you’ve slept it off, your car's steady

position might tell a different, much riskier story. Are you driving impaired without