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Britain’s Independent newspaper published a bombshell for psychiatry and medicine: the country’s Medical Research Council had sat on warnings 30 years earlier that benzodiazepines such as Valium and Xanax can cause brain damage. As 11.5 million prescriptions for these drugs were issued in 2008 in Britain alone, I focused on the consequences of the cover-up for the millions affected. Given the feedback I received from numerous patients in Britain and the States attesting to their profound difficulties in quitting such medication, as well as their impairment from the drugs many years later, I want to retrace the drugs’ controversial history, to help explain why the suppression of evidence about their side effects is deservedly national news in Britain, and why it should be here in the States, too.
For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — better known as the DSM — has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there’s the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That’s a label almost everyone can lay claim to.Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.
To read summaries of all international warnings and studies on anti-anxiety drugs (Klonopin is an anti-anxiety drug) click here for Anti-Anxiety Drug Side Effects It’s…
Touted as the world’s first wonder drug, benzodiazepines—”benzos” for short—were widely prescribed in the 1960s for anxiety and stress. Within a decade they had become the most commonly used treatment for such conditions in the States and Britain. Use of benzos such as Valium, Mogadon, and Librium in both countries was widespread. Today, the same class of drugs—including Klonopin, Xanax, and Ativan—is still frequently prescribed for anxiety and panic. Widely known to be addictive and to cause a range of serious side effects, benzos became less popular in the 1980s and 1990s owing largely to the rise of SSRI antidepressants, which were widely considered to be safer and nonaddictive. A combined search for benzos and “adverse effects” on PubMed yields a staggering 15,157 hits, ranging from sleep disorders and increased violence among patients to discontinuation problems and dependency issues that bear all the hallmarks of a serious addiction.