Some interesting quotes:
Prof Malcolm Lader
Psycho-pharmacology
King's College, London
[I]"It is more difficult to withdraw people from benzodiazepines than it is from heroin"
"The withdrawal symptoms you get are so intolerable that people have a great deal of trouble coming off"
"with benzodiazepines a proportion of patients go on to long term withdrawal and they have very unpleasant symptoms for month after month"[/I]
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“It is a tragedy that (these steps) are needed 50 years after benzodiazepines were first introduced. They could have been foreseen and prevented but instead the skeleton was locked away in the cupboard for many years. Now we are faced with worms that are crawling out of the woodwork including not only the problems of long-term prescribed users but also the increasing spectre of illicit benzodiazepine abuse.”
Professor H. Ashton Newcastle University
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“Perhaps a third of all drugs are now prescribed for their placebo effect, and sedative-hypnotic drugs much more than most.”
Charles Medawar Social Audit
“ For years, most doctors have assumed that benzodiazepines must have worked because patients kept taking them…..thus dependence has been reinforced – as has the belief that these drugs can go on working for years.”
Charles Medawar Social Audit.
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“Drug company research and development often serves marketing strategies more than sound science or patients’ safety.”
JS Cohen MD
“More than half of the experts on FDA advisory committees have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, that will be helped or hurt by their decisions.”USA Today
“An industry so important to public health and so heavily subsidized and protected by government has social responsibilities that should not be totally overshadowed by its drive for profits.”
Dr M. Angell New England Journal of Medicine.
“When doctors irrationally deny or dismiss (patients) honest complaints, the message is clear : Doctors first allegiance is not to their patients but to the medications they prescribe.”Dr JS Cohen.
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“ Increasing numbers of people have been turned into drug addicts through legal prescriptions which perhaps suits the politicians and multi-national bureaucrats as well as the drug companies for it ensures an uncomplaining and docile community which is easy to administer, manage and manipulate...tranquillisers are more addictive than heroin."
Dr Vernon Coleman
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Phil Woolas MP
Depurty Leader House of Commons
(on the subject of benzos - 12.2.04)
"These drugs are responsible for more pain, unhappiness and damage than anything else in our society"
“The story of benzodiazepines is of awesome proportions and has been described as a national scandal. The impact is so large that it is too big for governments, regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry to address head on, so the scandal has been swept under the carpet."
Phil Woolas M.P. Deputy Leader House of Commons
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[I]"If there's a pill, then pharmaceutical companies will find a disease for it." [/I] Jeremy Laurance, The Independent, April 17, 2002
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The Committee on Safety of Medicines (1988) gave Guidelines to all doctors that benzodiazepine drugs should be used for 2/4 weeks only.
Barry Haslam. Brain-damaged by overprescription of Ativan.
“Not only did doctors not keep to the CSM Guidelines but their inept and atrocious ‘clinical judgement’ coupled with their arrogance, has of today resulted in creating 1.2 million iatrogenic benzodiazepine drug addicts in the UK – The Lunatics are running the Asylum.”
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