Ambien Responds to Barr: ‘Racism Is Not a Known Side Effect’

Roseanne Barr said she was “Ambien tweeting” when she wrote racist remarks on Twitter that compared a black former Obama administration official to an ape, a comment that led ABC to cancel her television show.

But Wednesday the makers of Ambien, the sleep aid, were having none of it.

“People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world,” the company, Sanofi U.S., said on Twitter. “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”

Barr’s sitcom “Roseanne” returned in March after a two-decade absence on ABC. On Tuesday, the show was canceled after Barr, its star and co-creator, tweeted if the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” a reference to Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama.

Barr later apologized. But Channing Dungey, the president of ABC Entertainment, said in a statement that “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”

“It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible,” Barr tweeted. “I made a mistake I wish I hadn’t but...don’t defend it please.”

Ambien is a treatment used for insomnia with a wide range of possible side effects. Some people who use it or similar medications do things while asleep that they don’t remember — such as driving, or preparing and eating food, wrote Dr. Eric Olsen of the Mayo Clinic.

Barr is not the first celebrity to blame the drug for her behavior, and it has featured in court cases in what some lawyers have called the “Ambien defense.”

In 2012, Zolpidem, the generic form of Ambien, featured in a trial in which Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and the former wife of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, was accused of driving under the influence of the drug.

Dr. David Benjamin, a pharmacologist, testified that the drug has the odd effect of impairing a person’s judgment and functioning without that person realizing it. He also said it produced amnesia. In 2014, Kennedy, who said she took it by accident, was found not guilty.

Doctors who specialize in sleep medicine say that they see patients who describe having no memory of having sex, eating, driving or even blame the drugs for murder, which one lawyer described as the “Ambien defense.”

Dr. W. Christopher Winter of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine said he had had patients who have said they went to bed in one place and woke up in another; eaten odd foods in the middle of the night only to wake up to the debris; or driven to a fast-food restaurant and tried to order.

“I think the question with Roseanne is she is trying to say, ‘I am not really racist,'” he said. But he added: “The pills reveal the kinds of thoughts you are having which you are actively suppressing. The Ambien allows those kinds of thoughts to be expressed.”