Member

I am going to talk not about unnecessary prescribing and the tragic deaths associated with some of these prescriptions but withdrawal. The figures that we have managed to obtain show that up to one-quarter of adults on these drugs report their withdrawal, their coming off the drug, as being severe, and a significant proportion—while there are no particularly accurate figures here, the best estimates are about 10% of them—will experience withdrawal that is both severe and protracted. If one takes that as a minimum, we are talking about something like half a million people. What we mean by protracted withdrawal is withdrawal that lasts many weeks or months or longer as they try to come off these drugs. They are often in mental and physical pain and unable to work. Of course, this is a largely hidden crisis affecting patients one by one in the privacy of the home and often known only to relatives, close friends and service providers.