Today, 07 May, 1986
The Nightmare Pills:
How Millions Are Caught in The Tranquilliser Trap

By


The latest confidential statistics from the Department of
Health and Social Security show that in the last 12 months
for which figures are available about 30 million prescriptions
were written for tranquillisers such as
Valium, Librium and ATIVAN.

It is easy enough to explain why doctors started
prescribing tranquillisers 20 or 30 years ago.
At the time they seemed a perfect answer.
Barbiturates were going out of fashion.
And doctors were beginning to recognise that
stress related diseases are common.
Tranquillisers such as Valium seemed to offer a safe solution.
But it is more difficult to explain just why doctors
continue to prescribe these drugs today.

For the surprising fact is that for some time now
the drug companies have been warning doctors
that they are NOT suitable for long-term use.
My own estimate - which has not been disputed by
anyone from the medical profession,
the DHSS or the Home Office,
is that there are about 2,500,000
tranquillisers users in Britain.

And many say they are just as difficult to come off as heroin.
Joseph Tutt is not the only patient who
is so angry that he is suing his doctor.

Two other readers of mine have already consulted solicitors
and begun legal action.
And dozens more have written to tell me
that they are planning legal action.

If Tutt is successful many patients who have been given
tranquillisers or sleeping tablets and
whose lives have been devastated or damaged in some way
could have begun proceedings within months.
And it will be their doctors they will sue,
not the drug companies.
Some ten or fifteen years ago the drug companies were
promoting products of this type with unqualified enthusiasm.

And doctors could hardly be blamed for believing that
these drugs were both effective and safe.
But for years now there has been no such excuse.
Drug companies making these products constantly warn doctors not to allow
patients to take them for more than a week or two.
They advise doctors not to make
these drugs available on 'repeat prescription'.
Evidence showing that these drugs are addictive and potentially dangerous
has been accumulating rapidly since the early 1970s.
Numerous research papers have been published showing
that products in this group can cause problems such
as memory loss as well as anxiety, depression and sleeplessness.

Ironically, these are the three symptoms for which
they are most commonly prescribed.
The Committee on Safety of Medicines has received reports showing that
these drugs are well known to cause well over 100 different side effects.
Earlier this month the DHSS and the Home Office publicly admitted
that the size of Britain's tranquilliser addiction problem is worrying them by
bringing these drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 -
the same legislation that controls drugs such as heroin.
And yet thousands of doctors don't seem to take any notice.
It may be true that many still don't know what else to do
for patients who are suffering from anxiety or stress-related diseases.
The only conclusion I can draw is that several thousand
British doctors do not read articles in the medical journals nor do
they study literature which is published by the drug companies.

These painfully ignorant doctors have between them
created the biggest drug addiction problem
this country has ever known.

It's their addiction to prescribing these terrible drugs
that has given us a nation of junkies.
If Mr Tutt - and others like him - win,
the medical profession could be facing several million
very expensive lawsuits and its biggest crisis in modern history.
The flood gates will have opened.
Dr Coleman is the author of over 30 books including Addicts and Addictions.
The paperback edition of his latest book.
Life Without Tranquillisers, was published two months ago.
Since then he has received more than 6,000 letters from users who, he says,
are angry enough to sue the doctors that put them on the road to addiction.


IN ANOTHER ARTICLE HE WRITES:

" In New Zealand the sagas of drug catastrophes continue in
issue after issue of publications as diverse as
Truth, Listener, women's magazines and the newspapers.
In addition there have been several television programmes criticising the
adverse effects of drugs, like the asthma drug Fenoterol on
April 24 1989 and T.V. 3's Sixty Minutes on
the dangers of tranquillisers on September 23 1991, and on
October 2 1991 the expose of Halcion, since removed from the market.

These programmes and articles have exposed the hundreds of thousands of
people whose health has been wrecked by prescribed drugs,
like Valium, Lithium, Ativan, Mogadon and Halcion,
which far from helping patients quickly assume a stranglehold over them.
T.V. 3's Sixty Minutes' statement:
"It is only now that we know these drugs are dangerous"
reveals the censorship of NZAVS' evidence of the past 13 years as
the Society has attempted, through Submissions to Parliament
supporting its Petitions to Abolish Vivisection,
to expose the dangers associated with legal drugs which
is the consequence of formulating them on animals.
During the 13 years that the abolitionist message has been deliberately stifled
in this country increasing numbers of people have been made
into drug addicts through legal prescriptions,
which, as Dr Vernon Coleman, Great Britain's outspoken abolitionist
says in Life Without Tranquillisers,
"perhaps suits the politicians and multi-national bureaucrats
as well as the drug companies for it ensures an uncomplaining and
docile community which is easy to administer, manage and manipulate."

The drugs so widely criticised today are all formulated and tested on animals.
For this reason a terrifying percentage of today's populations are
hooked on mind-altering, addictive and
extrmely dangerous legally-prescribed medicaments.
Drug prescription is the present approach to health,
not because it is successful, but because it is profitable.
ARSL wants new drugs - but the World Health Organisation warns that
there are already far too many drugs.
Each new drug that appears from the pharmaceutical companies,
says the WHO, is almost certainly a carbon copy of a previous drug.
It is not an exaggeration to say that drugs are doled out
like chocolate drops for all our aches, pains and dis-ease.
Through these drugs millions of moderately unwell people
are turned into helpless zombies.
Modern drugs are more dangerous than tobacco,
and, says Dr Coleman,
"more addictive than illegal drugs such as heroin".

However doctors, and not the patients,
are the worst drug addicts as thousands of them take the
comfortable and easy way out, reaching for their
prescription pad without investigating their patients' problems.
Several times in this work the writer has criticised doctors for
shelving their responsibilities through their unswerving alignment to
chemical cures which results from the take-over of medicine by the pharmaceutical giants.
Each medicine taken off the market for damaging the patient
reflects the power and effectiveness of the drug-industry lobby and
their public relations and marketing advisers, who, quite often,
using unsavoury tactics, have succeeded in
persuading doctors to prescribe their products.
These drug companies expend careful strategy,
cut-throat competition and millions of dollars in
winning doctors over to prescribing their particular brands of poison,
some here in New Zealand were recently criticised for financing
struggling medical students on the understanding that when qualified
they prescribe the company's products.
Again and again, from a range of motives; lack of time,
lack of interest, powerful enticements and high-pressure methods of
drug companies' representatives, doctors accept the glossy brochures
and leaflets from agents of the pharmaceutical empire
believing their claims, promises and assertions.
But these doctors should be aware that the
supporting data on the benefits of drugs is extremely unreliable
as drug companies are able to entice with a fee
the writers of research papers to submit opinions of this or that drug
- the results of which will obviously be favourable and laudatory.
It is also extremely fortuitous for the doctors to believe that
remedies for all their patients' ills are available by
instant hand-outs of drugs, for in believing
what they are told by the manufacturers they are
absolved of the responsibility of investigating the reason for
the unwellness of their patients and with consciences dulled
dole out the palliatives which treat the symptoms without addressing their cause."

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