The agony of the patients turned into drug addicts by their doctors
It’s a scandal no one talks about — the epidemic of blameless people hooked on prescription pills because medics keep handing them out. Their lives are in ruins but — unlike illegal drug users — they get no help. Today we launch a major campaign to change
They are the forgotten victims of medical incompetence, the secret army of innocent addicts — hundreds of thousands of them — hooked on drugs prescribed by their doctors for pain, anxiety, sleeplessness or depression.
They had put their trust in the experts, only to descend into a nightmare of dependence on the very pills that were supposed to help them — and then find themselves abandoned to their fate.
Today the Mail exposes the national disgrace of the hidden and ignored epidemic of addiction to prescription drugs, calling for the Government to set up a 24-hour helpline for people hooked on prescription drugs through no fault of their own.
People such as 62-year-old Janet Waterton. For 16 years this grandmother of two battled an addiction to benzodiazepines, tranquillisers prescribed by her doctors to treat hip pain and insomnia.
Benzodiazepines include brands such as Xanax and Restoril, and diazepam, formerly known as Valium, the infamous Mother’s Little helpers that ‘anaesthetised’ a generation of British housewives in the Sixties and Seventies.
They are widely prescribed but are so addictive that doctors have been told repeatedly that patients should not be on them for more than four weeks.
Janet tried to wean herself off the pills but suffered severe withdrawal symptoms. But the drugs themselves left her feeling like a zombie and there are whole chunks of her life she simply doesn’t remember.
In desperation — and in the absence of any help from the health service — she and her husband, a mechanic, cashed in their Isas to pay for her to go into a drugs detox clinic, even though the NhS had effectively been responsible for her needing to be there in the first place.
She was strip-searched on admission and put in a dormitory with three heroin addicts. ‘It was hell — there were constant fights, prostitutes having sex in the corridor, another woman self-harming — I wondered if I’d survive,’ she recalls.
As she points out in the full version of her story told on the next page, all she’d ever done was take the benzodiazepines that her doctor had prescribed.
Shocking new figures from the University of Roehampton, published exclusively in the Mail today, suggest that as many as a quarter of a million people, like Janet, have been left on tranquillisers including diazepam for months or even years. ‘This is a scandal for which there can be no excuse,’ says Dr James Davies, the lead researcher.
AND the longer you are on benzodiazepines, the tougher withdrawal will be, with symptoms from sleeplessness, agitation, blurred vision and feelings like electric shocks in the limbs, to confusion, hallucinations, even epileptic fits.
But the problem is not just tranquillisers. Dr Davies also found that a third of long-term users of antidepressants, an astonishing 800,000 people who have been on the drugs for longer than two years, ‘have no clear clinical indication for [them] — in other words, they shouldn’t be on this medication’.
even antidepressants, while not regarded as addictive, can cause crippling withdrawal effects, such as anxiety, mood swings, paranoid delusions, hallucinations and — ironically — depression.
And ‘the longer you are on antidepressants, the worse and more protracted the withdrawal will be,’ says Dr Davies.
But the consequences of staying on drugs such as benzodiazepines can be harrowing, too.
They can lead to sleepiness, unsteadiness, problems with memory and concentration, depression and anxiety. These sideeffects can be mistaken for signs that the patient’s original problem is getting worse, so the dose is actually increased.
But these are not the only drugs behind the hidden epidemic of prescription pill dependence.
Nearly 13million people in the UK are prescribed opioid painkillers such as codeine, tramadol and fentanyl. These medicines are derived from opium or chemical equivalents and are highly addictive.
Shockingly, no one knows how many people might be taking opioid painkillers unnecessarily. But the cost to the NhS will be high. The over-prescription of tranquillisers and antidepressants identified by Dr Davies is costing the NhS £60 million a year.
And if the estimated proportion of over-prescription of antidepressants and tranquillisers is anything to go by, the total amount squandered on these drugs and opioids tops £160 million.
But the cost to patients and their families is incalculable, with patients caught in a trap of their doctors’ making — staying on the drugs can leave them unable to function normally, yet they can’t come off the drugs because of the terrible withdrawal effects.
And worryingly, these drugs are being shelled out in record amounts — opioid prescriptions alone shot up from three million to 23 million between 1991 and 2014 according to the National Treatment Agency. Prescriptions for antidepressants have risen by over 500 per cent since 1992.
It must be stressed that these pills can, and do, help countless thousands of patients — and of course, not everyone who takes any of these drugs ends up dependent upon them.
But for those who do, support is virtually non-existent: patients are left to fend for themselves, coping with a wide range of debilitating side-effects or fighting to withdraw with little or no support — unlike those who abuse illegal drugs.
Almost 290,000 people were treated by addiction services around the country last year — the vast majority were using illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Only 5,800 (2per cent) were seeking help with an addiction to prescription opioids only, according to figures from the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System.
This is not, say experts, because only a few people have problems — as the Government maintains — but because these services are desperately unsuitable for them, as Janet Waterton found.
‘Addiction services are funded to deal primarily with heroin, cocaine and alcohol problems,’ says Dr yasir Abbasi, clinical director of addiction services at Mersey Care NhS Trust and a member of the Opioid Painkiller Dependency Alliance, a group of medical professionals working in this area.
‘The kind of patient I see is a working mother who had breast cancer five years ago and is still on morphine. She finds it impossible to go to a drug centre and sit next to a heroin addict.’
When we asked the Department of health why the innocently addicted are denied the same level of support provided to users of illicit drugs, a spokesman told us there were ‘already a variety of options for people to seek help for addiction to prescription drugs’, including GPs, NhS 111, the FRANK confidential drugs helpline and NhS Choices.
Since 2013, the spokesman added, ‘local authorities are responsible for providing public health services, including the help for addiction that their communities need’.
BUT while local authorities spend £800 million a year on addiction services, their chief focus is on people who abuse illegal drugs. And even if middle-class housewives addicted to prescription tranquillisers were prepared to visit drug and alcohol addiction treatment centres, they would struggle to find any with the capacity to help them, says Professor Colin Drummond, chair of the addictions faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
‘Prescription drug dependence is the Cinderella of addiction,’ he says. ‘Drug addiction treatment services have been directed by the Government to prioritise treatment for illegal drugs.’
Over the past year, he says, funding to addiction services has been slashed by 30per cent ‘and
people dependent on prescription drugs have been pushed further down the priority list’.
There are some specialist services for people dependent on prescription drugs, but they are few and far between and, run by small charities, can only help tiny numbers in their local areas.
Last year the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence identified eight such organisations in the whole of the UK offering withdrawal services, covering only ‘a small fraction of the country’.
For a sense of their scale, one such provider, One Recovery, funded by Oldham Council, is currently helping 30 people in the town withdraw from prescription drugs. That tiny charities have to sort out the misery created by doctors is a disgrace. This is why today the Mail is backing a plea to the Government issued by the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society and 16 other leading medical organisations and patient groups for a national 24-hour helpline for people innocently hooked on prescription drugs.
The signatories are also calling for the helpline to be backed up by dedicated national support services for victims and better guidance for GPs and others on how to help patients withdraw.
Even when it’s done properly, withdrawal from benzodiazepines can take ‘months or years’, says the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Withdrawal should be done gradually, and only with proper support, adds Stephen Buckley, Mind’s spokesperson on mental health problems and their treatments.
‘We hear from lots of people who have been on antidepressants for a long time and want to come off them but with limited time and money and a huge number of patients to see, not every GP is set up to help,’ he says.
Indeed, while some GPs are aware of side-effects and withdrawal effects, and understand, for example, the importance of slowly reducing the dose, ‘others deny that the drugs can cause these problems, or insist on rapid tapers which can cause great harm to patients’, according to a report on the helpline proposal presented to the Government last year.
GPs point to a lack of specialist services to which they can refer patients.
This makes the Government’s response to the BMA’s appeal for a helpline all the more astonishing.
In a letter seen by the Mail, nicola Blackwood, under-secretary of state for public health, suggests ‘people who feel they might be dependent on either prescribed or over-the-counter medicines should seek help from their GP’.
‘I accept that this may not always be straightforward,’ Blackwood added. ‘However, help and advice is also available from... the 111 helpline or the online nHS Choices service.’
Clearly, these options are a world away from the dedicated services campaigners say are vital.
Undeterred, the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence is today, too, calling for the Government to set up a helpline.
‘Long-term users of antidepressants, tranquillisers and opioid painkillers can suffer devastating effects when they try to withdraw, often leading to