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.