Crippling toll of the NEW VALIUM that’s ruining the lives of millions

They’re the painkillers sold as being non-addictive. Now we reveal the . . .

With the arthritis in her hip plaguing her night and day, 44-year-old Rachel hancock depends on pain relief to keep her going. ‘i really need a hip replacement, but specialists say i am too young,’ says Rachel, a former catering assistant who lives in Derby with her husband and two grown-up children.

the pain started five years ago — Rachel had previously been prescribed tramadol, a form of opioid, but says she ‘needed higher and higher doses to get the same effect and i was worried about becoming addicted’. So after a year on tramadol, her GP switched her to gabapentin. this is a gabapentinoid (GABA) drug, a group of medicines developed for epilepsy, but which act on a nerve receptor thought to be key to sending pain signals in the brain. GABA drugs are increasingly being used to treat nerve pain such as diabetic neuropathy (a complication of diabetes), shingles pain and trigeminal neuralgia (severe facial pain).

Over the past ten years, the use of these drugs in the UK has rocketed; prescriptions of gabapentin have risen fivefold (from 1 million in 2006 to 6.5 million in 2016), while those for the GABA drug pregabalin, also licensed for anxiety, have risen tenfold (from just under 500,000 to 5.5 million).

Around 1.3 million Britons now take GABA drugs, according to figures from the Public health Research Consortium (PhRC), a research organisation funded by the Department of health. this is a huge rise from the 100,000 or so taking them in 2000.

And the rapid rise in prescriptions is setting alarm bells ringing among some experts. Doctors have been prescribing gabapentinoids because they were said to be nonaddictive and so preferable to benzodiazepines such as diazepam (previously known as Valium) and opioid painkillers.

But it’s now emerging that GABA drugs are addictive, and can cause withdrawal symptoms when patients try to come off them. Yet patients are not being warned of the risks.

GABA drugs are also being prescribed for pain they’re not actually licensed to treat, such as arthritis or lower back pain. And even when they are properly prescribed, they work only for a small percentage of people.

As Good health has highlighted, there have been growing concerns for some time about the long-term use of drugs such as opioids and benzodiazepines to treat pain, anxiety and depression. these drugs can cause crippling side-effects and some experts say they are highly addictive. When patients try to stop taking them, they can experience even worse withdrawal symptoms.

it’s thought hundreds of thousands of patients in the UK may be dependent on these drugs, through no fault other than trusting their doctors to know best.

For years doctors have been warned not to prescribe benzodiazepines for more than four weeks. But while prescriptions of these medications are finally falling, this has been mirrored by a rise in prescriptions for GABA drugs, according to the recent PhRC report.

Significantly, while patients prescribed benzos tend to be older, those given GABA drugs tend to be slightly younger as GPs have moved away from prescribing the known ‘problematic’ drugs.

At the time of their launch in the Nineties, GABA drugs were celebrated as game- changers, because they specifically targeted hard-to-treat nerve pain.

‘they were marketed as drugs that could reduce the need for strong opiates,’ according to Rachel Britton of the drugs charity Addaction. ‘GPs were encouraged to use pregabalin and gabapentin in guidance about how to manage chronic pain, where we were seeing the use of long-term, high-dose opiates.’ GABA

drugs were very much the ‘ drugs of the decade’, says Des Spence, a Glasgow GP who has raised concerns about the rise in their prescription.

‘Like benzos and opioids, these drugs were tested in short-term trials in a limited group of people and we were told they were safe. So GPs have been prescribing GABA drugs as alternatives, unaware there were problems with patients developing dependence and difficulties coming off them.’

Despite being initially regarded as non-addictive, it’s now clear GABA drugs can lead to dependency. Last year, Professor Les iversen, then chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, wrote to the home Office warning they present a ‘risk of addiction’ and a ‘potential for illegal medicinal misuse’.

Another leading expert, Professor David healy, a consultant psychiatrist in Bangor, Wales, and a founder of the drug safety website RxiSK, says the drugs are ‘unquestionably addictive’.

‘it was clear to a lot of people right from the start that it wasn’t true that they were non-addictive,’ he says. ‘You can get hooked on any drug that affects the brain.’ Some experts, such as Dr Spence, fear the drugs have the potential to be the new Valium, the highly addictive drug, also known as ‘ Mother’s Little helper’, that turned countless innocent patients, many of them women, into prescription pill addicts. ‘Like Valium, the GABA drugs have been prescribed widely very quickly and they have also the potential for abuse,’ he says.

‘there are issues with patients developing dependency on gabap-