A letter to the Department of Health by Jim Dobbin MP
Sarah Brimson,Customer Service Centre,Department of Health,Richmond House,79 Whitehall,London,SW1A 2NS7 February 2008
Dear Sarah,
I am Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Involuntary Tranquiliser Addiction, which is concerned with the damage to individuals and society caused by the toxicity and addictiveness of benzodiaziepine tranquilisers and also the similar ‘zed’ tranquilisers. There are an estimated 1.5 million benzodiazepine addicts in the UK and a further number of zed tranquiliser addicts.
Correspondence has been shown to me in which you have replied on behalf of Ms Primarolo on this issue. I refer to your letter of 21/01/08 to Mrs June Thistlethwaite. With regard to withdrawal services for Involuntary Tranquiliser Addicts, none are available in this country with the exceptions of one worker in Oldham and one in Belfast.
Primary Care Trusts, the National Treatment Agency and drug action teams do not spend their drug treatment budget on involuntary tranquiliser addicts; the Department of Health has no targets for Involuntary Tranquiliser Addiction
and even the Treatment Outcomes Profile questionnaire of the NTA does not include explicit monitoring of Involuntary Tranquiliser Addiction.
The NTA have agreed that in practice they do not treat Involuntary Tranquiliser Addiction. With regard to the toxicity and addictiveness of tranquilisers, the continuing guidance and advice from the Committee on Safety of Medicines to which you refer have been available to prescribers since 1988. These guidelines are routinely ignored by prescribers, who are employees of the Department of Health.
The guidelines are only guidelines and are not enforced by the CSM, the Department of Health or any other body. Prescribers continue to create new addicts in contravention of the guidelines and rarely take responsibility for the withdrawal of existing addicts.
The instalment prescribing facility you refer to is a misconceived response to Involuntary Tranquiliser Addiction. It is based on a mistaken assumption that it is the addicts who are misusing the drugs and that they need to be controlled. The immediate cause of Involuntary Tranquiliser Addiction is misprescribing and misuse of the drugs by the prescribers.
You refer to a reduction in benzodiazepine prescribing in England in 2005. However, if zed tranquilisers are added to this figure, total tranquiliser prescriptions have increased.
For these reasons, I have to agree with Mrs Thistlethwaite that your reply is not helpful and I believe that the Department of Health needs to reconsider its position on this serious and continuing problem.
Yours sincerely
Jim Dobbin MP
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