Pharma’s Message on Benzo Withdrawal
In June a reporter from the Watford Observer wrote this:
“The pharmacist said withdrawal can lead to the symptoms returning and patients must be weaned off slowly.....
Quote: "It is like a crutch being taken away and you can feel anxious again.””
A Decade of Drug Dependence, Watford Observer,
June 27, 2008
http://www.benzo.org.uk/watford1.htm
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it - except for the fact that the majority of the millions of UK citizens given benzodiazepine prescriptions since 1961 (including the 1,000,000 plus still addicted today) were not suffering from clinical anxiety in the first place. Most of them had problems possibly amenable to very short term prescribing but more likely, problems which would have disappeared with the passing of time or a change in circumstances.
The list below, constantly being added to, shows clearly why people were prescribed drugs they became addicted to. Note the rarity of conditions which might actually be classified as clinical anxiety. In any case there is no convincing evidence that the drugs work beyond a month or two, so that even those with clinical anxiety would need to take ever-increasing amounts in order to experience the mind-numbing effects.
The real reasons for prescribing are at odds with the statement from the pharmacist. If clinical anxiety was not your problem in the first place, how do you justify the statement that the often extreme anxiety felt in withdrawal is a question of returning symptoms?
The pharmacist’s message to the reporter and to readers of the newspaper is the result of dedicated Pharmaceutical/Political/Medical education. Pharma has always maintained that withdrawal symptoms of anxiety are due to the fact that the tranquillisers were prescribed for anxiety and it is those symptoms re-manifesting themselves. Five points:
1. Pharma’s message to doctors was that benzodiazepines could be prescribed for virtually
anything – and they were and still are –well over two billion prescriptions in the UK.
2. Even those who had no anxiety before their prescriptions face anxiety in withdrawal.
3. Most withdrawal reactions remain unrecognised because they have never been investigated.
4. No research equals no evidence equals the non-existence of symptoms.
5. Belief in the Pharma message has led to prescriptions being inappropriately continued, so
how efficacious were these drugs in the first instance? Did they cure anything?
Professor Heather Ashton estimates that 15% of users suffer permanent damage. Professor Malcolm Lader recognised over twenty years ago that there were people who were still suffering withdrawal symptoms ten years after stopping the drugs.
The pharmacist’s comment was not informed but represented a false expertise, based on what Pharma has pushed as reality and medicine and the Department of Health have been keen to accept as truth. The real truth about withdrawal symptoms - for a good proportion of people a process without end, is a far murkier and serious business than the pharmacist knew.