I HAVE just watched Darren McGarvey’s harrowing documentary about the drug epidemic in Dundee.
The city has the unenviable claim of being Europe’s drug death capital. It is awash with a combination of prescribed drugs, heroine and methadone. Throw in alcohol and deprivation and you have a hellish mix.
Watching the programme for me was very much a case of deja vu. I worked for 30 years as a mental health nurse in a variety of settings. I trained and worked for ten years at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. At the time that city had a severe drugs problem much along the lines of Dundee today.
I remember one memorable occasion when the then physician superintendent of the hospital asked myself and a colleague our opinion of methadone, which had become widely prescribed by GPs throughout the city.
We told him that in our experience, and also the word on the street, methadone tended to just add to the problem and there were a growing number of methadone addicts in the city. He told us that he was of similar opinion and that he would try to use his influence to review the guidelines whereby methadone was prescribed.
Over the years I have seen patients admitted to hospital with different prescription drug problems. Between 1980 and 1985 I worked in Grimsby, where there was a huge problem of Benzodiazepine addiction that was reflected nationally.
Since then there has been a massive over-prescribing of antidepressants on a national scale. There is a growing amount of negative evidence of how dangerous antidepressants can be. I wonder what percentage of Scotland’s high suicide rate has perhaps been caused by antidepressants along with a lack of meaningful talking therapy.
The latest enormous over-prescribing of medication is statins. There again is growing evidence that the benefits are massively overstated by GPs and the manufacturers. Recently the worldwide sales of statins went over the one trillion dollar mark. That means that there are a lot of people getting very rich.
America is experiencing a massive epidemic of opioid addiction and there are currently hundreds of class actions going on against drug companies and the doctors who have been wrongly prescribing the highly addictive and dangerous drugs.
The obvious common factor in these examples I have given (there are more) is the fact that they are made by international drug companies. Due to the medical monopoly that doctors have, many doctors, especially GPs, have unwittingly become agents of the drug companies.
They tend to automatically reach for the prescription pad in the misguided belief that drugs will cure all ills.
The reality is that drugs do not actually cure very much. Mostly they manage symptoms until nature takes its course or the drugs begin to show side effects, at which time another drug will be prescribed and so on.
Politicians have been duped into accepting the medical model and are assured that NICE guidelines are there to ensure safe and correct practice. Just remember that the guidelines have effectively been put in place by the drug companies and their very well paid “agents”.
We have just this week discovered that there are around one million women who have developed breast cancer due to incorrect treatments prescribed by doctors. NICE guidelines are “to be reviewed” because of the issue. That means that doctors were blindly adhering to the guidelines previously.
After watching Darren McGarvey’s documentary I feel that I have come full circle. It is obvious that we have learned nothing. We just have a new generation of doctors and experts applying exactly the same guidelines and getting exactly the same results.
Meanwhile we cannot access medicinal cannabis, which has proven to work for many people with many varied conditions and which has zero side effects. The problem with medicinal cannabis is that it is natural and cannot be patented. Therefore the drug companies cannot make trillions of dollars selling it to us.
Remember that your MP is happy for you to perhaps become addicted to some of the most dangerous drugs known to man but they will not stand up to the drug companies and medical mafia in order for you to get medicinal cannabis.
Harry Key
Largoward
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