Australia bans sleeping drug after Hackett revelations SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia has banned its athletes at the London Games from taking strong sedatives after former Olympic champion swimmer Grant Hackett said he had become reliant on the drug Stilnox (zolpidem). The 400 or so athletes heading to London could have their rooms searched and face punishment up to and including expulsion from the team if found to be in breach of the ban, Australian Olympic Committee chief John Coates told reporters on Tuesday. "We have decided to amend our team medical to make it absolutely unequivocal that we prohibit the use of Stilnox and other related drugs," he told a news conference. If, in extreme circumstances, they still need to be prescribed drugs, there is a short-acting drug temazepam, which does not have the same addictive and hallucinatory effects as (Stilnox). Hackett won the 1,500 meters freestyle gold at the Sydney and Athens Olympics but came up just short of a third successive title in Beijing four years ago. In an interview with the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper last weekend, the 32-year-old said he had been prescribed Stilnox, which is not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), to battle insomnia and described it as "evil."