ANN ALTHOUSE:

“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of” Ambien.
Tweets the manufacturer of Ambien, quoted in “Sanofi, the company that makes Ambien, rebuffed the assertion Wednesday on Twitter.”

But “racism” is an abstraction, a label applied to what Roseanne did — which was to tweet “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj” in reference to Valerie Jarrett.

We don’t know what motivated those words. Perhaps it was real racism, but it could also have been a wild, reckless urge to outrage or a confused angry silliness. What was Roseanne’s emotional state at the time of the tweet, and does it have any relation to any of the known side effects of Ambien?

The American Addiction Centers website discusses the possible cognitive impairment that Ambien users have experienced, and I’ll just excerpt some of the things that could be related to a stupid expression like Roseanne’s:

Difficulty concentrating
Disorientation to place or time
Loss of emotional affect…
Excessive sedation
Confusion and disorientation…
Hallucinations
Impaired judgment
Aggression

Sanofi’s snark is first rate, but it doesn’t exclude the possibility that Ambien was Roseanne’s problem. That said, blaming Ambien sounds lame — and yet, ironically, making a lame excuse could be caused by Ambien. Lame excuse-making could be the result of confusion or disorientation or impaired judgment.

Drudge is tweeting about this stuff. It might have been better for Sanofi to keep its mouth shut here.