Prescription pain and anxiety drugs now cause more deaths in USA than traffic accidents

The Los Angeles Times reports: "Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found. Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.""

A big part of the problem is that so many of these drugs are highly addictive. And of course when drugs are 'legal' drugs, and when it is legal to advertise them, people are more likely to think of them as 'safe'. But these powerful pharmaceutical drugs, which include OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma, are very clearly not safe. Pharmaceutical drugs have adverse effects/side-effects, one of which can be addiction, and another of which is premature death.

It is best to avoid prescription drugs as far as you can, and if you feel you must take them, then take them at the lowest effective dose and for the shortest necessary time. Always check out the possible side-effects and cautions and look out for these side-effects. Obesity and degenerative health conditions are often side-effects of prescription drugs: see HRT and other prescribed steroids and amitriptyline and other antidepressants.

A safe, drug-free way to reduce pain and anxiety is to optimise your nutrition and, as far as you reasonably can, cut down on salt and salty food. You will feel so much better. - Dieting is a frequent cause of ill-health, pain and depression, so avoid dieting. If you are overweight, lose excess weight the safe, easy way, without drugs or dieting.

That UK prisoners who are no longer drug-dependant are being deliberately put back onto methadone beggars belief!

See the report in the Telegraph. - No, it's not a late April Fool joke. There really are criminally stupid decisions being made to put prisoners back onto extremely addictive methadone before their release from prison "to minimise the risk of them taking an overdose." I submit that this practice would undoubtedly increase the risk of further criminal activity and ill-health and unhappiness.

Does this country have a drugs policy or not? - I suggest it does have a drugs policy and I suggest that that drugs policy appears to be to promote the taking of pharmaceutical drugs when these are prescribed drugs, however harmful they are, however much they damage lives, as long as their sale brings profit to the drugs companies. The government seems only to want to discourage drug-taking when the drugs are illegal drugs that have not caused any enrichment to the bloated drug companies. My submission fits in with the scandalous, catastrophic waste of many millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on unneeded swine flu jabs (BBC News report) and with the persistant failure to put legal curbs on the over-prescribing of anti-psychotics: see http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/2010/04/anti-psychotics-double-risk-of.html

Scotland's Methadone Policy Comes in for Some Stick

Scotland's methadone policy is severely criticised in this BBC News Item.

I agree with the criticism. To get heroin addicts to take methadone for periods of many years (an example in the article is of a man put onto methadone at age 16 and still taking it 18 years later) in the hope of curing their heroin addiction is clearly illogical. Methadone itself is highly addictive and so there is a strong chance of converting a heroin addict into a person addicted to both heroin AND methadone. I consider methadone an example of expensive pharmaceutical junk.

And according to the article "it costs about £2,800 to fund methadone provision for one addict for one year, and the programme could be costing about £56m in total each year."

This methadone policy is obviously of little benefit to the addicts' health and is a scandalous expense to the public purse. It appears to me to have been invented and to be manufactured expressly to fleece the taxpayer, since it benefits the drug companies and their shareholders, and no-one else.

I for one do not approve of this expensive, and in my view, immoral, exercise in futility.

The way to get people off drugs is to get them off drugs, not to get them onto other or additional drugs.

I used to know a woman who had been prescribed amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant with a host of unpleasant and harmful side-effects, for post-natal depression and was still being prescribed it 30 years later! - This is madness...

Spending hundreds of millions of pounds on drugs treatment programmes has failed to improve the success rate of addicts coming off heroin and cocaine.

Addicts kick drugs 'at a cost of £1.85m each'

Extract from Telegraph article:

"Spending of hundreds of millions of pounds on drugs treatment programmes has failed to improve the success rate of addicts coming off heroin and cocaine, according to a report.

The budget of the National Treatment Agency (NTA) has increased from £253 million in 2004-05 to £384 million last year, it said. But the number who emerge from programmes drug-free is still small.

Last year, 5,829 users were cured of their addiction, compared with 5,759 three years ago."

The astronomical expense of the monumentally useless/inefficient National Treatment Agency beggars belief! - It should be dismantled - if that's the word - immediately, if not sooner! - But of course our profligate and equally useless Department of Health defends the National Treatment Agency!

Lose weight and improve your health in many ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Is Britain going to Hell in a handcart?

Can our broken society be fixed? - by Iain Duncan Smith in the Sunday Telegraph

Extract:

"The economy has been growing for 14 years yet the bill for social security payments has risen by £35 billion in that period, and there are now over five million people dependent on benefits, 3.5 million of whom are economically inactive.

The Government constantly tells us that we need more economic migrants to fill the job vacancies while seeming indifferent to the waste of human capital at home.

Although almost everyone is capable of doing something, too many people in Britain are unable or unwilling to work, increasingly detached from the rest of society; in too many places unemployment has almost become hereditary.

I have met many inspiring leaders of voluntary groups in the inner cities who have shown me what works and what doesn't work. Government action, they say, although motivated by good intentions, can often exacerbate existing problems or create new ones.

That is why Britain tops the international league tables for social problems. In the last 15 years alcohol consumption amongst adolescents has doubled, with 10 per cent of 11- to 12-year-olds regularly binge drinking.

Britain, when compared with other advanced economies, has the largest proportion of drug addicts, the highest levels of personal debt, the highest levels of family breakdown and one of the largest gaps in educational attainment between rich and poor.

With the cost of crime standing at £60 billion the failure of the Government to tackle the causes of crime is also evident; over two thirds of all offenders are alcohol and drug addicts, two thirds come from a broken home and have the reading and numerate age of children of 11.

Furthermore, one third of all young offenders were in care, yet only 0.6 per cent of all children in this country have been in care."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free...(o: