BOOKS

"In 1982, I was prescribed Ativan, one of the benzodiazepine family of tranquillisers. I spent the next five years in a state of misery, chasing a new, pervasive and mysterious illness that doctors could not diagnose... Eventually, I identified what was the matter with me: I had been addicted."

Over half a million people are dependent on benzodiazepine tranquillisers and sleeping pills in Australia alone. How is it that dangerously addictive mind-altering drugs are sold so readily to a trusting public?

Beatrice Faust exposes the great international scandal of drugs that are sold without sufficient testing, drugs known to be dependence-inducing or harmful from the time they are released.

Combining well-documented research and reports from other persons dependent on benzos, Beatrice Faust´s timely and important book is a biting analysis of malpractice in the medical-industrial complex. Doctors, drug companies and governments all profit from pushing benzos. Faust goes beyond critique and personal experience, pointing constructively towards a more preventative, holistic, patient-centred medical ethos.

POWER AND DEPENDENCE discusses the safety of medicines from a consumer perspective.  It focuses attention not so much on molecules, as on the conduct of the medical profession, government agencies and the drug companies.  The extent of drug injury in Britain is compared to the extent of death and injury on the roads.  It is suggested that drug injury is often avoidable - and that most of it can be traced to misconduct of some kind.

The book discusses the safety of medicines in the context of power and dependence.  These themes are mainly elaborated in a detailed case history which explains why millions of people around the world became addicted to benzodiazepine tranquillisers like Valium, Ativan and Halcion.  Evidence is given that the risks were always obvious and that the providers of medicine, between them, readily let this happen.

This book argues that levels of drug injury will remain unacceptably high until decision-makers are required publicly to explain and justify what they do.  But at present, the pharmaceutical industry seems in some ways dangerously powerful, and government dangerously secretive and unresponsive to consumer needs - while many doctors, as drug prescribers, seem far out of their depth.

This informative book on benzodiazepine problems can be ordered from:

Social Audit Ltd
PO Box 111
London NW1 8XG
UK

"ABHÄNGIGKEIT AUF REZEPT" schildert wie Hoffmann-La Roche und andere grosse Hersteller von Benzodiazepinen die beträchtlichen Risiken dieser Medikamentgruppe in der Dritten Welt verharmlost haben.

"DEPENDENCE ON PRESCRIPTION" describes how the Swiss drug company Hoffmann-La Roche and other major benzodiazepine manufacturers conceal the risks and side effects when marketing their drugs in the Third World.

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