placebo and the sleeping pills reduced the time it took people to fall asleep (between ten and thirty minutes), but the change was not statistically different between the two. In other words, there was no objective benefit of these sleeping pills beyond that which a placebo offered. Summarizing the findings, the committee stated that sleeping pills only produced “slight improvements in subjective and polysomnographic sleep latency”—that is, the time it takes to fall asleep.
