TIME TO KICK THIS DEADLY ADDICTION

As a report reveals GPs are doling out pills harder to get off than heroin . . .

FOR most of us, the term drug addict conjures up the distressing image of a pale, thin youngster slumped on a park bench after injecting or smoking heroin or crack cocaine.

Yet many of the patients suffering from drug addiction that I see don’t fit this description at all.

They are regular, law-abiding men and women, just like you and me. They go to work, do their weekly shopping and have loving families. In fact, many of them are old enough to be grandparents.

One woman I saw recently in clinic was in her late 60s and retired. She’d had a successful career working for an accountancy firm, was married with two grown-up children, cared for her very elderly mother, went swimming once a week and had an allotment. She was also a drug addict. There was, however, one important difference that set her apart from the juvenile, cadaverous stereotype we tend to envisage. Instead of getting her drugs from a backstreet drug dealer, she got them from her GP.

Crippling

This woman is one of the tens of thousands of people who have become addicted to prescription medication such as painkillers and sleeping pills.

For far too long, the plight of these addicts has been ignored by the authorities. But now, thanks to a relentless two-year campaign by the Mail, Public Health England has finally decided to act. With one in four adults prescribed potentially addictive drugs in the last year, we can only hope that it is not too late.

In calling for the creation of a national Helpline for those addicted to prescription drugs, as well as demanding new guidelines to clarify when doctors should intervene to stop people taking medicine, Britain is finally facing up to the fact that it has tragically been failing everyday addicts.

Crucially, this new guidance finally recognises that while antidepressants aren’t actually addictive, like painkillers or opiates, trying to give them up can cause withdrawal symptoms so crippling that patients often feel they have no choice but to return to taking the tablets once again.

This could be the fate that awaits the 11.5 million people in England who have received at least one prescription in the past year for sleeping pills, tranquillisers, opioid painkillers and antidepressants.

The woman I mentioned earlier, for example, had been prescribed drugs after a series of stressful life events 25 years ago. A quarter of a century on, she was still taking them.

The drug she was given, diazepam (previously marketed as Valium ), is abenzodiaze pine—a group of tranquilliser medications prescribed to reduce the symptoms of anxiety.

They can be incredibly useful in the very short term — no more than a few days — but too often patients are given repeat prescriptions and can find themselves taking them for months, or even years.

With these kinds of drugs, the cycle of addiction is unending. I’ve often been told by former addicts that they are far harder to give up than heroin. Indeed, many doctors secretly refer to any kind of detoxification from them as a ‘die-tox’ because the withdrawal symptoms — insomnia, violent shaking, sweating, hallucinations, crippling anxiety and panic attacks — are so gruesome that people really do feel like they are dying.

But it’s not just benzodiazepines to which patients become hooked. Many are addicted to opiate painkillers.

Often these are prescribed as pain relief, but GPs — too stressed to review a patient’s dosage — simply hand them out on repeat prescriptions.

I have spent years working in drug dependency clinics and know only too well the misery that this inattentive attitude can cause.

Blinkered

Indeed, the NHS continues to focus on the dangers of illicit drugs, while ignoring the fact that prescription drugs can also be the source of such a deadly addiction.

Because they are handed out by a GP, rather than a drug dealer in a back alley, the damage wreaked by the drugs just isn’t considered a priority.

This blinkered approach to the prescription crisis hasn’t been helped by the fact that those addicted to benzodiazepines and prescription opiates are often older women, who tend to prefer not to make a fuss or appear bothersome. As a result, they are largely ignored.

And even when they do seek help, they are often sent off to detox at outpatient drug dependency units that were primarily set up to deal with heroin and crack use.

Their situation is made all the worse by the sclerotic bureaucracy that often prevents specialist drugdependency services — usually run either directly by the NHS or by a charity on behalf of the NHS — from functioning properly.

When I was working at one drug dependency unit, the NHS bureaucrats hadn’t even set up a contract to ensure it was paid for treating those patients who were sent to us by GPs.

The patients were understandably distraught because this dysfunctional system meant that there was nothing we could do except direct them back to the GP.

And yet the fact is that GPs are given little, if any, training on how to manage prescription drug addiction. I’ve often been sent patients whose GP has been put them on a detoxification programme to wean them off prescription drugs — only to discover that the GP had tried to reduce the drug dosage ten times too fast.

This is a problem particularly associated with patients addicted to painkillers, for whom there are often no specialist services. The situation can become so desperate that the only option for a doctor is to switch them on to methadone — another opiate used to treat heroin addiction, which has to be taken at a clinic or surgery every day.

How did this epidemic slide out of our control?

I think a significant source of the problem is that GPs feel both ashamed and embarrassed that patients have become hooked on medications that they have prescribed, so they simply avoid facing up to it.

Unrelenting

It’s an awkward truth that sometimes the pills we dish out can cause more problems than they ever solve.

Yet doctors, increasingly left frazzled by the growing pressure they are put under, are still all-too-willing to reach for the prescription pad when confronted by a patient with complex psychological issues.

Meanwhile, on a societal level, there is a failure to appreciate that an addiction to prescription drugs can be as unrelenting as any other.

At present, there are thousands of people up and down the country who are being let down by the Health Service; those who, through no fault of their own, have become hooked on the pills their doctor gave them.

Finally, two years after the Mail first shone a spotlight on the grim effects of doctors’ loose prescription pads, justice for victims is in sight.

It is about time that the NHS recognised today’s dire situation and saved those addicts it has helped to create.