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.

ADDED: The NYT addresses the question whether Ambien could caused the severe lapse in judgment or break from reality that could explain Roseanne's tweet?

So-called working memory — the mental scratchpad where the brain manipulates numbers, names and images — may shrink temporarily.... Yet these effects, taken together, have much more in common with sleep deprivation than with Tourette-like outbursts of insults and epithets. Tourette’s episodes typically arrive as a deluge and generally have no rational connection to the person’s usual behavior....

Many people have reported hallucinations while taking Ambien... daydreams so vivid they are like waking dreams — before the person snaps back into the here and now. Sleep scientists suspect that at least some of these reactions represent “mixed states,” when mental processes of the slumbering brain leak into the patient’s waking hours...

AND: Roseanne's offense is chiefly to have violated a particular well-known social norm against any suggestion that a black person looks like an ape. Looking at a human face and seeing likeness to an animal is very common. We often think someone has a "horse face" or looks like a chicken or — in the case of Mitch McConnell — a turtle. Apes have the most resemblance to humans, so this common way of seeing animal faces in humans is most likely to happen with apes. Donald Trump was famously called the son of an orangutan, and George Bush was often pictured as a chimpanzee. I had a colleague at the University of Wisconsin Law School who posted on her office door a set of pictures of George Bush and chimpanzees making various faces. It was stock humor at the time. But everyone is supposed to know that you just do not do that with black people.

Roseanne transgressed that social norm. Had she forgotten about it? I doubt it, but comedy often involves an outrageous transgression. What's one thing you absolutely should not say? That's a question you might use to brainstorm a comic routine. Shock the bourgeoisie is the old artist's credo. But the bourgeoisie shocks back. You get the consequences. Some jokes won't be taken. "Roseanne" is/was a network sitcom.

But the question here is: Could Ambien have caused it? And I'm saying that the only cause needed was the destructive impulse to violate a strong social norm that has to do with race. I do understand the argument that the racial idea had to be in her head before it could have exerted pressure to leap out, but if she'd kept the idea to herself, like so many other people who are aware of the strong social norm, she wouldn't be in any trouble at all.