Many prescription drugs have the same or similar damaging effects to those of illegal drugs. Benzodiazepine tranquillisers are illegal drugs used as medicine. The damage is accepted when they are taken illegally but it is not when prescriptions are involved. One lot of users are criminals and the other lot are patients. One lot of users knows what they are doing and one lot thinks the doctor knows what he is doing.
This reality is ignored by government, regulators, medicine and the media. This is the great surreal. Pharma manufacturers tell regulators and medicine that the psychotropic drugs they produce are medicine and without question this message is accepted.
As writer Michael Pollan said:
"Historians of the future will wonder how a people possessed of such a deep faith in the power of drugs also found themselves fighting a war against certain other drugs with not-dissimilar powers.”
He is talking about the US experience but it is no different in the UK, it is merely on a smaller scale here.
In the UK Charles Medawar said:
“My belief is that in thirty years our grandchildren will look at the way we prescribed antidepressants in the twentieth century with the same disbelief as we look at the way we prescribed tranquillisers thirty or forty years ago.”
The results of that tranquilliser prescribing are still with us and indeed over-prescribing has continued down to today. Had there been a million or a million and a half illegal addicts on the street, something would have done about it by now, but that million plus people in the UK get their supplies from doctors and therefore it is easy for government to keep it hidden and feel no urgency about what is in fact a great health scandal.
Prescription psychiatric drugs are all close cousins chemically to illegal psychiatric drugs and with benzodiazepines they are identical.
Historically medicine has used a variety of chemicals on patients, some that were illegal, had been illegal or would become illegal. Psychiatrists in Hollywood used LSD, ecstasy apparently has a future as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol was once a treatment for anxiety, Freud used cocaine for depression and amphetamine-based drugs are used to treat ADHD in children. Both cocaine and amphetamines enhance the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. If you take Effexor and Wellbutrin together, the same neurotransmitters as cocaine are affected. SSRIs affect serotonin and so does ecstasy.
In 1975 a US psychiatrist said: "Drug companies probably will continue to produce increasingly sophisticated and disguised amphetamines, and these 'new' drugs undoubtedly will be greeted with initial enthusiasm by the medical establishment until it is recognized that any drug with amphetamine-like CNS [central nervous system] stimulating properties almost invariably is just as toxic, potentially addictive, and therapeutically limited as Benzedrine or Dexedrine."
It might not seem a good idea for the media to examine (and keep examining) the question of whether psychiatric drugs used in medicine are the same or similar to illegal drugs. It might not seem wise to look in too great a detail at whether these identical or similar drugs can be used safely merely because they are re-branded as medicine. The acceptance and blindness over the contradictions is a spectacular success for the marketing arm of Pharma—by placing a doctor between the drug and the person it seems any drug can make it big with few asking the right questions.
Colin Downes-Grainger
13 February 2009