LIVES ARE BEING RUINED BY LEGAL DRUGS
by Cormac Burke, Ireland on Sunday
STRETCHED OUT on one side of his living room couch, best-selling author Paddy Doyle looks drained. He is paler, more tired and more subdued than those who have met him before would expect.
A sufferer from Idiopathic Torsion Dystonia from the age of eight, his condition leaves his body in constant spasm and has been likened to doing an eight hour gym workout every day of his life.
In recent weeks, however, he has begun a struggle which, he says, is worse than those he endured due to his disability or during his time in a horrific regime as an orphan in an industrial school – chronicled in his book The God Squad Paddy is trying to beat a 40-year drug dependency which has been legitimated by the medical profession.
Given that his condition has no known cure and no certain cause, it is surprising that he was spent 42 years on benzodiazepines, highly addictive drugs which are supposed to be prescribed for only four weeks at a time. In recent weeks he has broken down crying for no particular reason, a symptom he says borne of frustration and the effects of withdrawing from the drugs.
He turned 50 a fortnight ago yesterday and, while his wife Eileen says he is not the sort of person interested in a big bash, he was not up to partying anyway.
In the process of coming off the drugs, he is very much aware of the uphill struggle he faces.
In use since the late 1950s, benzodiazepines are used as either tranquillisers or sleeping pills.
As long ago as 1988 British medical authorities were warning GPs that, due to addictive nature of the drugs, they were not to be prescribed for longer than four weeks. A number of circulars from Department of Health chief medical officer Dr Jim Kiely in recent years have similarly warned Irish doctors about the dangers of benzodiazepines.
According to GMS Payments Board figures, however, the numbers of prescriptions written for benzodiazepines has only fallen slightly in recent years.
In 1995, a whooping 848,000 prescriptions for benzodiazepines were handed to public patients by doctors, not taking into account prescriptions filled by those without medical cards.
In 1999, the last year for which figures are available, over 805,000 similar prescriptions were dispensed. In fact, the number of prescriptions for the well known sleeping tablet valium (diazepam) increased over that four year period from 306,000 to 336,000. In Britain, between one million and one-and-a-half million repeat prescriptions for benzodiazepines are written every year. Like Paddy Doyle, tens of thousands of Irish people face an addiction which is sanctioned by the medical profession every day. During all his 42 years on benzodiazepines, Doyle says he has never had a kidney or liver function test or had his heart checked out for the effects of all those years of medication.
At one point, he was taking a cocktail of eight drugs three times a day, every day, three or four of which were benzodiazepines. “No-one is supposed to be on more than one benzodiazepine at a time,” he says. “I was on three or four at the one time.” And benzodiazepines can cause an awful lot of damage, including excess sweating, weight loss and mood swings. Some can even cause depression, it seems, while others aggravate spasticity (spasms).” His decision to give up benzodiazepines came after his condition worsened and the medical profession were unable to help him. Having read up on the drugs and, beginning to be sure that they were doing more harm than good, he decided enough was enough.
I just got it into my head that it was all a scam and that I was going to get off these things,” he says.
Having begun to reduce his intake over a month ago, he says he is already feeling better and is less "jumpy and jerky". It’s not going to take me that long, but I won’t do anything reckless. I think I’ll be far less prone to spasms and mood changes. “A psychologist friend said to me: ‘Paddy, one morning you’re going to wake up and realise you have been asleep for 40 years. “It’s important to stress that I never robbed a single pill from any hospital press or anything like that. This was medication handed to me by medical people, who told me it was going to fix me up. “The brain is the most complicated computer known to man and yet we’re dabbling with it every day of the week and know almost nothing about it. I think at this stage, having fecked me around since the age of eight, it’s time for the medical profession to put it right, or at least as right as they can. They turn people into drug addicts. It may even be worse then being on heroin or morphine.
The issue as I see it is about trundling out drugs to people. When people are so vulnerable, they go to their doctors and say they are not feeling right and the doctors tell them they are depressed and to "Take these for a month and if you’re still feeling bad, you can try them for another month’. “But after four weeks these things are useless, never mind for four months, four years or in my case 40 years.
In fairness to doctors, people do expect to leave a doctor’s surgery with a magic pill which will solve all their problems.” Limerick-based Dr Terry Lynch, the author of the controversial book Beyond Prozac, echoes Doyle’s sentiments. He says that, after media attention to the side effects of a benzodiazepine called Ativan in the late 1980s, a local doctor he knew actually publicly apologised to his patients for prescribing benzodiazepines. “Doctors do help people but I am questioning how doctors work and why they work the way they do,” he says.
If people are suspected of having a biochemical problems, like a thyroid problem, or are suspected of having diabetes, they are given a blood test. But thousands of people are diagnosed as having a biochemical disorder of the brain every week but there is no test to prove that. Some people are diagnosed as having mental illness within three or four minutes of walking into doctors’ surgeries. Doctors are enthusiastic to prescribed anti-depressants.
Why are we presuming that, when we don’t know for sure?” He says antidepressants, which are replacing benzodiazepines as the new panacea, are equally as addictive.
Doctors say these drugs correct a chemical imbalance, but, having studied the medical evidence there is little proof of that. These drugs certainly change how a person feels. The older types of tranquillisers tend to sedate, while the more recent products stimulate the patients. “A substantial number of people I would say 20% to 30% feel absolutely awful while they are on them.
The medical profession says that antidepressants are 70% effective, but I don’t believe that.
Quite a number of people may get better on medication, but quite a number not on drugs get better as well.
TENS OF thousands of people experience a similar hell to Paddy Doyle, imprisoned behind the bars of addictive drugs legitimated by the medical profession.
While addictions to painkillers such as codeine are common, the most debilitating dependencies are believed to be to benzodiazepines and anti-depressants.
ADDICTIONS
According to Limerick-based Dr Terry Lynch, who has penned a controversial book on the topic called Beyond Prozac, history is repeating itself when it comes to addictions to legal drugs.
"There have been five or six groups of drugs which were introduced in the past and were not supposed to be addictive," he says. "Those include alcohol, opium, barbiturates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines and, now I fear, anti-depressants.
"We have been very slow to recognise the addictive nature of drugs. In the past, it has taken 20 to 25 years for doctors to accept that certain drugs are addictive. There was medical proof, but doctors didn't really want to explore that."
He says that the core of the problem is that doctors are "preoccupied" with finding a "drug" solution to mental distress.
"Over the past 50 to 60 years, the medical profession has decided to treat those sort of problems as an illness," he says. "The starting point decides the way of treatment. If it is an illness, it is treated with a drug. But if it were classified as something else, then other forms of treatment would be used.
"I feel that a lot of what is being called mental illness is an experience - human distress.
"If people aren't sleeping well, for example, there are ways of dealing with that other than a pill. I am in favour of more therapy-based treatment. A fundamental problem in medicine is that we doctors don't believe in that approach. The value of therapy is grossly underestimated. Doctors are suffering from a case of tunnel vision."
MEDICINES
"The issues involved in the over-prescription of medicines are very serious and a more radical approach may have to be taken in the future.
"The direction of health care doesn't come from the Department of Health; it comes from doctors because they are the ones who decide which treatments are valuable and which are not.
"Patients need to be listened to and heard and they need time. But if patients were given that time, doctors would make less money."
