You're a mod
@Ganjcat? Dude, I'm gonna be straight up with you my man. I have no ill will, literaly, not a negative bone in my body for you my friend, but you seem to be a little bit green on matters regarding drugs that at the end of the day, could only be considered quite basic indeed. I'm not saying you don't deserve it. I'm not saying I hate you. I'm sure there is something happening that I don't understand or you're fucking with me or something.
You have said and done nothing wrong here, but you're showing up to a SEAL Team 6 pre-mission pow-wow and asking questions like "if I get shot will I like, automatically die or could I perhaps live"? There are going to be some uncomfortable moments in that powow.
Tolerance and dependence are quite difficult to chart my friend. Providing predictions isn't super helpful but isn't entirely useless. Time makes nonsense of everything though. The hardest part really is time. The Hellenic peoples, the Mycenaeans made collossal temples that were the awe of the world (sure others were doing it too) and were the masters of there domains. There was what was called the "Late Bronze Age" collapse, a studied period circa 1000bc in which civilizations around the mediterranean just were sent back to school for a few centuries, only to emerge more or less the same after their "Dark Ages".
Those new Hellens, whom we believe the mothers of all knowledge worth knowing, after a few short years, couldn't remotely fathom where all those neat buildings came from. Not, it was hazy, they really had no fucking clue. It was just flesh and blood greek people, a few years before them, yet time had rendered these unforgettable objects forgotten. This eventually came to feature heavily in the mythology of the Greeks (the Gods built that shit it's so nice).
My long-winded point? You would never believe that something so beautiful, so important, so central, so... everything to an entire people, their pride, their culture, in the end, they couldn't even keep track of the records for even a few years.
You will tell yourself that, my life is too important for me to make such a mistake as remaining on Benzodiazepines for 10 straight years. It's just going to be 3 months MAX. Many, many people forget, even though it's their life at stake. It is so hard for us to say, for this reason, well, "we have hordes of people who have gotten high on Benzo's, who took flawless notes, for decades" we really have nothing but conjecture and shit.
What you need to know is that they are very addictive. Do not forget that the word addictive is a first-cousin to Seduction. That beautiful woman who makes you forget all about how shitty it would be to have to raise triplets with neither of you working, for five seconds of bliss, just to be able to come inside her. That sort of shit. We are far more prone to following ridiculousness than we allow ourselves to believe.
It will happen over days, then weeks. First withdrawal will occur, say within 3 months of consistent, mostly daily usage (let's say you're taking them five days a week to be conservative). This withdrawal is not gonna be super intense, it will just be a primer. If you return to using Benzos you will now experience this syndrome in some way every time you go without them. Over time, regardless of dosage, the dependence to Benzodiazepines seems to really crystallize in people. Escalating doses though, are so often a factor. This leaves many "normal" people shells of themselves in 1-2 years of moderate but consistent Benzo usage.
They can still break away at this point and have a normal life. It's not over, but it's much, much harder. You have to be less seducable than you were before despite the fact that you are indeed a weaker person than you were then thanks to the reliance on the pills. This deficit is often what makes the sobriety "so close, but oh so far away" for many.
This becomes a decade. At this point, Benzos are a part of your physical biology. They will be regulating things like sleep, wake, hunger, thirst, sadness, anxiety, all will now be in some way connected to the Benzodiazepines. Breaking away from more than just a single dose is a nightmare hell capable of killing you through convulsions. How does one become less seducable after being brough to their knees in such a way? Well... it usually doesn't happen, just like you all were already thinking.