Unhappy anniversary

February 2, 2003 - Source: http://www.observer.co.uk

Forty years ago, Valium was the new wonder pill. Now, with up to a million Britons addicted to tranquillisers, GPs and drug companies are under fire. But as the long battle for compensation is fought out, the suffering continues

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Much has changed in Pat Edwards's life in the past 40 years. She has divorced, she has moved from London to the South Coast, she has become a grandmother. But one thing has stayed the same: she is still taking the Valium.

Pat Edwards was 25 when she was first prescribed the drug at the end of 1962, a few months before its official launch the following year. She had become unaccountably weepy after the birth of her second child, a condition we may now recognise as post-natal depression. Her local GP in Hackney gave her four days' supply of Valium, a suitably cautious amount for a new treatment, and four days later, after some improvement, Edwards was given another small supply. The drugs seemed to have an immediate effect, and she made plans to return to her job as a hairdresser. But then something else happened.

'One morning I was on my mum's doorstep crying my eyes out. My mother called the doctor, and he didn't come round to see me but upped the dosage of my tablets. They went up from one tablet of five milligrams to two, so I was on 10 milligrams a day. This went on for another month, until one day I simply couldn't leave my mother's house. My mother thought I was being silly, but I would have terrible panic attacks and start sweating if I couldn't see the front door.'

Agoraphobia was not a well-recognised medical condition in the early Sixties. The doctor was called again, but Edwards says he failed to visit. Instead, the dosage was increased again, to 15 milligrams. He also prescribed Marplan, an anti-depressant. Edwards's condition failed to improve. 'In those days you believed in what your doctor gave you without question. I used to send him a stamped addressed envelope every month and he sent me back a month's supply of tablets.'

Edwards is 65 now, and housebound. She is a heavy-set woman, and looked to me like the actress Kathy Burke plus 30 years. She lives alone in a bungalow in Durrington, a short distance from Worthing in Sussex. Her mother died nine years ago, and her principal support comes from her daughter and her neighbour. She has received disability allowance only for the past eight years, since her osteoarthritis necessitated use of a wheelchair.

'In the past 40 years I haven't had a life,' she says. 'No one can say they've seen me go up the street on my own, or take my children out on my own, or go on a bus. When my daughter was at primary school her teacher told her she couldn't understand why I never came to the parents' evenings. If my mum hadn't been there to look after them they probably would have been taken into care.'

She is still taking the tablets, now prescribed under the generic name diazepam. Her dosage has been greatly reduced in the past few months, but she had a traumatic experience at Christmas after cutting down below five milligrams a day. When she first visited the local surgery in Durrington last summer her new GP greeted her with disbelief. He didn't think the drugs were doing any good. She told him she'd been on them for 40 years. He said: 'You shouldn't have been on them for more than four weeks.'

Valium and similar drugs in the benzodiazepine group are widely considered to belong to a previous generation, replaced in the treatment of insomnia, panic attacks and all manner of modern anxieties by more sophisticated drugs with side-effects of their own. The reality is somewhat different. In the year to March 2002, 12 and a half million prescriptions to benzodiazepines were written in England alone. In the previous year there were 13.028 million.

The Department of Health has no indication as to how many patients are receiving repeat prescriptions, or for how long. But Professor Heather Ashton, a specialist in psycho-pharmacology at Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle who ran a withdrawal clinic for more than a decade, believes there are half a million people in the UK who have been taking benzodiazepines for several years.

The official guidelines issued to prescribing doctors 15 years ago advises continued use for no more than 28 days. The Home Office has other figures, for the amount of deaths in England and Wales in which drug poisoning is included in coroners' reports. Between 1997 and 2000, cocaine was included in 273 reports, while diazepam and tamazepam - only two generic types out of 17 available for prescription - were included in 795.

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