Pop the pill culture

The extraordinary benefits of modern medicines are almost too numerous to mention. They treat bodily infections, mental afflictions, and dull pain along the way. To insomniacs they bring the sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care; to the fretful they offer a balm for hurt minds. It is near impossible to imagine life without them.

And that can be a problem. For increasing numbers of patients, prescription painkillers and antidepressants are becoming not a temporary relief but a way of life. Such is the concern in Government that ministers have ordered a wideranging review of so-called prescription drug addiction. This is urgently needed, and just a casual glance across the Atlantic reveals why.

In America, addiction to prescription painkillers has become a plague, bringing with it death and destruction on a truly staggering scale. Pills containing semi-synthetic opioids proved a pharmaceutical smash hit, but the cost quickly became apparent. At the beginning of the century the death toll from overdoses numbered a few thousand each year. Now it exceeds 50,000 annually – more than gun deaths or car accidents. This plague is no respecter of station or celebrity: while it has ravaged deindustrialised communities where unemployment is high, it also played a role in the deaths of pop singer Prince and the actor Heath Ledger.

If this island is to avoid a similar cataclysm, there can be no official complacency, so a review is welcome. Its lessons must be implemented. But to ensure that what Donald Trump has called America’s “national health emergency” is not replicated here, we will all have to play our part.