Addictive tranx drugs recklessly over-prescribed long ago are linked to lasting brain damage

Yesterday's Independent on Sunday article informs us that the link between benzodiazepines and similar psychotropic drugs and brain shrinkage was made years 30 years ago and the Medical Research Council agreed in 1982 there should be large-scale studies done, but they were not done. I urge you to read the article.

The IoS tells us that Catherine Hopkins, the legal director of Action against Medical Accidents, has stated, "The failure to carry out research into the effect of benzodiazepines has exposed huge numbers of people to the risk of brain damage. This research urgently needs to be carried out, and if the results confirm the suspicions of the 1981 expert group, it could lead to one of the biggest group actions for damages against the Government and the MRC ever seen in the courts.""

I remember these extremely harmful, extremely addictive tranquilliser and hypnotic drugs - Valium, Librium, Mogadon, et al being prescribed with reckless abandon for all kinds of purported conditions. I remember people taking them in the 60s and 70s - taking them in good faith - and some of them becoming Zombie-like in consequence. Years later I took them myself (they were mainly prescribed to women, in a ghastly example of rampant medical sexism), along with amitriptyline, a dangerous anti-depressant, as the caring professions played a cruel game of pretending that my agonising toothache was 'really' Depression - still a favourite 'diagnosis'/insult used to cover up dental/medical negligence. Read my Mensa article on Cruelty, Clinical Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS

It took me 8 months of monumentally difficult struggle to wean myself off the Mogadon, which is reportedly far more addictive than heroin. Some poor souls took these drugs while pregnant and have had to live with the corrosive guilt of irreparably damaging their babies while they were still in the womb. Many unfortunate victims are still addicted to tranquillisers today, decades after starting to take the drugs, and incredibly, doctors are still prescribing these drugs. I would strongly advise anyone to decline to take any of this pharmaceutical junk. It is far more likely to harm you than to help you.

The country should be grateful to Esther Rantzen, who on her programme, That's Life, fought to curb the terrible consequences of the medical profession's love affair with tranquillisers. Until she took up the matter, doctors, guided by profit-motivated, not-to-be-trusted drug company reps, were assuring patients who reported their dreadful symptoms of addiction that the drugs had not caused their symptoms and that they should continue to take them.

Irresponsible prescribing of diazepam/Valium is again on the rise in UK

The Sunday Telegraph reports that prescriptions for diazepam aka Valium are rising dramatically. The benzodiazepine family of drugs, which includes Valium, are extremely addictive yet were heavily over-prescribed in the 1970s, and have destroyed the lives of millions of people, mainly women. Were it not for Esther Rantzen and her investigative television programme “That’s Life” this horrifying damage to innocent people would have continued to escalate, as the drug companies assured their medical dupes that the dreadful symptoms their patients were suffering were not caused by the drugs, but by the putative underlying illness. See the article in The Independent of 31 October 2009 where we read that:

"In 1980, an item on Esther Rantzen’s BBC TV programme “That’s Life” detailing the difficulty some people had withrawing from Valium, provoked the biggest response in the programme’s history, exposing a problem on a huge scale that had gone unnoticed by doctors. GPs had until then assumed, when patients complained of symptoms of withdrawal, that this was the anxiety returning - and prescribed more drugs. “That’s life” was later celebrated as the TV programme that changed the course of medicine.

In 1988, doctors were warned by the Committee on Safety of Medicines that prescriptions for the benzodiazepines should be limited to a maximum of four weeks . The warning was re-iterated by Sir Liam Donaldson, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer in 2004."

That irresponsible GPs are adding to the already huge numbers of innocent victims of these harmful drugs is hard to credit. Their freedom to prescribe these drugs should be curbed by Law and there should be severe sanctions against any further flouting of the guidelines about it.

In my informed opinion, prescription drugs cause most of the avoidable illness and disability in the UK and in the USA.

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

"Chemical cosh" administered to teenage girls in 1980s Church of England children's home has caused birth defects in their own children

This Telegraph article draws attention to a scandalous practice in the 1970s and 1980s in which teenage girls were forcibly and inappropriately dosed with powerful psychotropic drugs as a method of behaviour control. As well as the harm and indignity perpetrated on these girls at the time, further dreadful harm has resulted in later years.

When these girls as adults gave birth to babies, the babies were born with serious disabilities. We read that "One of the women, Teresa Cooper, had three children, all with birth defects, after leaving the home in 1984 at the age of 16" and that she had been "given medication at least 1,248 times over a 32-month period."

On this BBC News webpage we read that "evidence shows the girls were, for years, given drugs which had been strongly criticised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Teresa, for instance, was given major tranquillisers: Haloperidol, Droleptan and Depixol. She was also given valium, diazepam up to 10 times the current recommended dose and Sparine, another major tranquilliser.

Jeffrey Aronson, professor of clinical pharmacology at Oxford University, says he has not seen a situation to compare and that the amounts and types of drugs given to Teresa were "unacceptable"."

I urge you to read the whole of the BBC news article. The 1980s are not very long ago. This appalling cruelty on defenceless children should never have been considered acceptible.

Prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs: legal and lethal...)o:

This is an article from the Times. It is long, but well worth reading.

Prescription drugs: legal and lethal

Extracts:

"In one of its less sensational aspects, our escalating fondness for taking drugs that won’t get you arrested can be measured in the 10% annual rise over the past three years in the use of antidepressants, notably our old friend Prozac. The NHS issued 31m scripts for Prozac in 2006, a blanket figure that, however it breaks down in terms of the numbers of users referred to, suggests that a lot of people are regularly taking a powerful antidepressant. Then there are the Valium guzzlers. The Council for Involuntary Tranquilliser Addiction (Cita), run by Liverpool University, guesstimates that there are as many as 1.5m nervous types in this country who have become accidentally addicted to benzodiazepines, the family of tranquillisers to which Valium belongs. Others take them knowingly, for fun. According to Professor Heather Ashton of Newcastle University, author of a pamphlet on addiction to benzodiazepines, these “are now taken illicitly in high doses by 90% of drug abusers worldwide. They are part of the drug scene”. So well integrated are they that abusers will crush the pills and snort or inject them, the same way they might cocaine or heroin.

More worrying in a way, because they attract less attention, are those habit-forming drugs that can be bought without prescription at high-street pharmacies. Concern about these has given rise to a new coinage in the world of drug dependency, “OTCs”, an abbreviation for painkillers bought “over the counter”. This usually refers to the more powerful varieties of OTCs, such as codeine, which contains synthetic opiates. At a conference of the General Medical Association in 2004 it was suggested that there might be 50,000 OTC addicts in Britain today. The authorities are also concerned about OTC drugs causing suicidal tendencies: the European Medicines Agency is calling for OTC drugs to come with a “suicide rating”."

"The prescription drugs causing most concern are antidepressants. Prozac, which has been around for 20-odd years, is old news. The two newcomers currently causing medical debate are the branded drugs Efexor and Cymbalta. These are classed as “selective seratonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors”, or SSNRIs. The added “N” is what makes them special. Unlike Prozac and other SSRIs, these drugs do not simply increase levels of seratonin, the brain chemical that makes us feel more sociable and relaxed. They also boost adrenaline, making us more energetic and sometimes slightly manic."

Just because a doctor has prescribed it, it doesn't mean a drug is safe.

More and more children are being harmed by the reckless and ever-increasing prescribing of anti-depressants to children

How do we tackle the rise in the number of children on anti-depressants? - Independent

Personally, I'd make it illegal for doctors to prescribe antidepressants or any other psychotropic junk (like ritalin, say) to children, and impose severe sanctions on any who then issued such prescriptions to children, including having the doctor automatically and permanently barred from dealing with children in any capacity as a doctor.

I don't buy the claim that doctors are merely responding to pressure from parents. - Nonsense! - Too many doctors have become drug-pushers for BigPharma, to the great detriment of the nation's health and happiness.

Research commissioned by MIND, the mental health charity, indicates that a walk in the country is more effective at reducing depression than antidepressants are; their benefit is small if any, their adverse effects are many, and very serious, and very common. - It is a pity they are prescribed at all; and patients are rarely warned about them. - And as you will see in the extract below, the drug companies cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their damaging products, which ruin so many lives.

Extract from the article:

"When Stephen Bailey was eight years old, he was prescribed Librium by his doctor. That was the beginning of a 24-year addiction to mind-altering drugs which, Bailey says, changed the course of his life and saw him descend into a world of fits, screaming and violence whenever he tried to withdraw. A commonly-used tranquilliser, Librium is one of the benzodiazepine family, and was prescribed to calm Bailey after he suffered from migraines and flashing lights in response to a routine set of vaccinations.

"I became absolutely petrified of the world, full of terror, in particular that I would swallow my tongue," says Bailey. "It felt like my mind was controlled by something else and I retreated into my own world. They affected my thinking in every way. I felt like I was chemically lobotomised."

Because of stories such as this, Librium, Valium and other member of the benzodiazepine family, are now not routinely prescribed to children. But that doesn't mean we have stopped medicating our children – far from it. New figures released last month show that in the past decade the number of prescriptions for mind-altering drugs, including anti-depressants such as Prozac, given to children under the age of 16 has more than quadrupled. Last year, there were more than 631,000 cases of drugs such as these given for mental health problems. In the mid 1990s, this figure was 146,000.

This increase is in spite of guidelines from Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) that GPs should offer three months of " talking therapy" before reaching for the prescription pad.

The issue was highlighted by the case of Mollie Murphy, who last year was prescribed a course of anti-depressants at the age of four after she became distraught at being separated from her friends when she failed to get a place at her local school. "We are in danger of not having learnt from the benzodiazepine story," says child psychiatrist Dr Mike Shooter, chairman of the children's mental health charity Young Minds. "People saying we're going through the same cycle with anti-depressants. The prescription rate is rising fast, and it worries me."

According to Dr Shooter, the reasons for the dramatic increase in prescriptions are complex. "One factor is the pharmaceutical companies marketing these drugs as happiness in the form of a pill," he says. " In the process they have concealed the fact that they don't actually bring happiness. There is also controversy at the moment about drug companies concealing lack of effectiveness." Dr Shooter believes that young people are increasingly turning to doctors with problems of life rather than actual depression. "The demand for a diagnosis is great," he says. "The greater the pressure the GP is under, the greater the temptation to reach for the prescription pad."

According to a Unicef report published earlier this year, the UK is now one of the least happy places for a young person to be brought up in the whole of western Europe. "There are more socio-economic problems facing children these days than there have ever been," says Dr Shooter. " I've worked in areas where there's a lot of family breakdown, alcohol abuse, violence and so on. It's pretty desperate, and young people living in these situations can be miserable. Half the kids I saw would satisfy the criteria of ADHD or depression – but they were just reacting behaviourally to the mess they lived in. The answer is not a pill." "