Valium will make you mildly retarded and it's one of the substances that can kill you through withdrawal.
It never ceases to amaze me how different people's subjective experience of different benzos is. I mean it's quite normal for people to have different reactions to the same medication/substance, but benzos really seem to bring out the most wildly different takes. In my case, I would say that clonazepam (Klonopin) is one of the benzos that makes me feel "slightly retarded" while diazepam (Valium) is one of the smoothest, most forgiving benzos of the whole bunch.
Also, I assume you meant that all benzodiazepines can kill you through withdrawal rather than just diazepam.
Personally, I have found clonazepam and lorazepam two of the most unpredictable and easy to blackout on benzos. I don;t know what it is about lorazepam (Ativan) especially, but it fucks me up: balance goes out the window, can have blackouts (or at least memory gaps) even just on a 'normal' single pill dosage (of 2.5mg), and I find that it comes back the next day (for an encore haha) and leaves me virtually nodding out for an hour or two. Other benzos I can tolerate quite normally, even at slightly above standard therapeutic doses (e.g. alprazolam at 4mg is fine, etizolam at 4-6mg is fine, and diazepam at 3o-40mg is fine) but just 2mg of loraz is very unpredictable and can have me literally falling over spontaneously and forgetting what the hell I did the evening before.
