"Designer benzodiazepines" are lab-created chemical derivatives of prescription benzodiazepines. They have not been approved for medical use and there is limited information on their safety and toxicity. More potent than their prescription counterparts, this subset of novel psychoactive substances have been growing in popularity in recent years and pose the potential for dangerous levels of intoxication.

In this podcast, Dr. Sahil Munjal, program director of the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist psychiatry residency program, leads a discussion of the article “Clinical Management of Designer Benzodiazepine Intoxication: A Systematic Review," with his coauthors Dr. Gregory Noe, Katelyn Li, and Nicholas McDuffee. They provide an overview of designer benzodiazepines in comparison to prescription benzodiazepines and describe the findings from their review of 35 case reports. They discuss clinical presentations of designer benzodiazepine intoxication, common approaches to clinical management, and key takeaways from their review of the literature. Their article appears in the March-April 2025 issue of The Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.