"about 4 years ago i started having early-morning awakening/insomnia/anxiety after excessive alcohol consumption the night before. discovered that i could prevent this by taking diazepam my wife had lying around. when this ran out my gp prescribed lorazepam 0.5 mg. gradually this lost effectiveness (tolerance) so i quit, also cut down on alcohol. a year ago i had a stressful situation and started 0.5 mg daily for a month, but was able to stop again with no side effects. however, my early-morning awakening/insomnia/anxiety had become chronic and independent of alcohol. a month ago i started 0.5 mg daily for 10 days, had a severe withdrawal, had to taper off. so, yes, like others wrote here: it works great, but not for chronic use."