Prescribing addiction

THROUGHOUT history doctors have made disastrous mistakes, prescribing treatments fashionable at the time – from draining patients’ blood to administering toxic medicines – which have turned out to do more harm than good.

But as a Mail campaign has long argued, never has a medical misjudgement affected more patients than the modern fashion for dishing out antidepressants like sweeties, too often with little awareness of the longterm consequences of addiction, with its hugely distressing side-effects.

Now an authoritative report underlines the massive scale of the problem. Published in the Journal of Addictive Behaviours, it finds that of the millions taking antidepressants, a shockingly high percentage are at risk of withdrawal symptoms.

Says Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drugs: ‘Medical guidelines in this areas should be urgently updated to reflect the fact that antidepressant withdrawal is much more common, severe and longlasting than previously stated.’

In light of the new data, the review cannot come a moment too soon. Meanwhile, doctors must surely think twice before prescribing potentially harmful drugs to patients who just need cheering up.

WHEN a Mail investigation exposed the scandalous hoarding of public money by the Motability car scheme for disabled drivers, we were told we’d got our facts and figures wrong.

Yet after MPs confirmed our findings, the private firm operating the scheme – whose chief executive was paid a monstrous £1.7million last year – has miraculously found a ‘spare’ £500million to pump into its charitable arm.

It is too much to hope that Motability will now apologise to this paper. But it is reward enough to know that taxpayers’ money will at last help the people for whom it was intended.

NO wonder the reception for Ruth Davidson at the Conservative Party conference was rapturous – she has proven she can turn the flat-lining Scottish Tories into winners.

She issued a call for the factions within the party to unite and made a glorious defence of Britain – ‘The Union that’s most important to us is our own: The Union of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.’

No wonder she can confidently declare defeating the SNP in the Holyrood election is her aim.