Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11250
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: book
Downes-Grainger C.
Prescription for Injury: The Politics of Pharmaceutical Manufacture, Regulation and Prescription
2007
http://www.actionminddrugs.org.uk/index2.html
Abstract:
This book examines the question of how it is that medicine inflicts widespread damage through mind altering drugs in particular but also a range of other drugs. It goes into the reasons why so often dangerous drugs are sold to regulators and doctors as safe and it is left to patients to discover later that this is far from true. The history of tranquillisers has been pulled together to show that doctors are not as expert as they think they are when they prescribe, that drug companies routinely exploit the existing medical system in the UK, that politicians and regulators fail to protect public health while saying that they do and that the British legal system allows almost no possibility of redress.
The Department of Health has no idea how many have been affected by tranquillisers, SSRIs and many other controversial drugs, and it does not seem to want to know. But many thousands have told their stories in the media and on the internet. The thousands who died have sadly been unable to tell their stories. In respect of tranquillisers, some people who died or who were injured did not themselves take the drugs-they were killed or injured in accidents by those who had. The benzodiazepine story is most notable because of the huge numbers of people to whom tranquillisers were prescribed-and because many of them subsequently became very sick due to over-prescribing. The history of tranquillisers is a clear description of a system which out-sources drug production to profit motivated private enterprise but then maintains a system of drugs regulation which it is almost impossible to penetrate. Medicine, Pharma and politicians defend what happens to patients in order to defend the system they have jointly created. This is the reason why they show no desire to listen, and continue to learn nothing from the chequered history of drugs.
Prescription for Injury shows clearly what the UK government would not wish included in its description of ‘our way of life’-including what benzodiazepines have done to a great many patients for nearly fifty years. The question might be asked, “Is the first duty of the state really the protection of its citizens?†If it is then government has failed to protect. This examination of the past raises the suspicion that the maintenance of a failing but profitable system and the avoidance of responsibility, is seen by government as being politically more desirable than the introduction of an efficient protective healthcare agenda. The only protections that patients have against drug disasters are the enlightenment of doctors, strictly honest science and effective regulation, but all of these health safeguards have regularly failed in the past, particularly with psychotropic drugs, and the true enormity of these failings is clearly illustrated by benzodiazepines.
