C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
Mention Thalidomide to anyone under 40 years of age, and in a majority of cases you will get a blank look. Similar reactions apply to Opren and the names of numerous other pharmaceutical drugs which have been proved life-threatening, deforming, crippling, psychosis-inducing or otherwise deleterious when ingested by human beings.
People’s memories are often short-lived and as one British Prime Minister put it: “A week in politics is a long time”, as a result of which, when helped along by expert P.R. agencies and massive lobbying, the mistakes and excesses of the psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity can quickly be erased from the consciousness of our politicians and the general public.
Even victims’ groups with daily in-family reminders of the effects on body and mind of inappropriate, over-dosed, addictive or incompletely tested pharmaceutical drugs, are eventually hammered into apathy by the psycho-pharms and even more tragically – by the stone-walling of government departments which they are led to believe are there to protect them.
Unfortunately what is not recognised – especially by those same government departments – is the fact that ministers and civil servants alike have been ‘blind-folded’ and ‘ear-plugged’ by psycho-pharm propaganda to a point where they are now effectively puppets of that industrial fraternity, seeing and hearing only that which these vested interests want them to see and hear.
One of the biggest, not so recent yet still on-going examples of the psycho-pharmaceutical industry ‘getting away with murder’, is the benzodiazepine debacle, scandal, disaster, catastrophe, tragedy or whatever description you may wish to apply to the ruining of the lives of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of mainly older people who have been involuntarily turned into drug addicts.
The main guilty substances are the benzodiazepines, diazepam (Valium), temazepam, lorazepam (Ativan), nitrazepam (Mogadon), flurazepam, flunitrazepam (Rohypnol), zolpidem, zopiclone, chloral hydrate (Welldorm), clomethiazole, and a number of other generic and branded substances all listed in the “Hypnotics” section of the ‘British National Formulary’, the pocket reference book published by the British Medical Association together with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.
Hypnotics are prescribed to sedate during the day and to induce sleep at night, although at night anxiolytics are more often recommended.
Prescribing of these drugs is widespread, BUT BOTH PHYSICAL AND PSYCHO-LOGICAL DEPENDENCE as well as tolerance occurs. Dependence means ‘addiction’ and ‘tolerance’ means that they have a declining effect leading to usage of larger doses.
As a result, there may be difficulty in withdrawing the drug after it has been used regularly for more than a few weeks.
Whilst these drugs are essentially intended to have a calming, tranquil, anti-anxiety or soporific effect, they sometimes inexplicably produce a nearly opposite reaction of aggression, excitement, anti-social acts and heightened anxiety.
The hypnotics (and anxiolytics) can impair judgement and slow reaction time and thus affect the ability to drive or operate machinery, and the hangover effects of a night dose may impair driving on the following day.
Withdrawal from one of the benzodiazepines can take from 4 weeks to a year or more, even when done on a medically supervised basis and even with the ‘help’ of an anxiolytic such as diazepam, which is reduced in minor dose increments over a considerable period of time.
In truth, although the above withdrawal programme has helped some to overcome their dependence on the ‘benzos’, a majority of patients who have been prescribed such drugs for longer than a month or so, fail to overcome their addiction and fail to withdraw, leading to growing addiction based on increased dosages brought about by their development of tolerance.
In fact, experience has shown that for most people withdrawal becomes increasingly impossible, the withdrawal symptoms themselves being so extreme in terms of acute anxiety, great physical discomfort and other unconfrontable conditions.
As a result, the question inevitably arises as to why these drugs are still being manufactured, why they are still being prescribed (not by all, but by many doctors) and why the government’s National Health Service continues to spend more and more taxpayer’s money on incapacitating more and more middle-aged and older citizens.
Yet, when challenged, Health Ministers defend the drug producers, the drugs & the huge expenditure, and play down or ignore the expanding addiction which has been created!
Remember, these hypnotic drugs are not being prescribed to heal patients’ bodies. What the psycho-pharmaceutical boys have managed to do is to enrol all the millions of people who are now on these drugs as psychiatric patients without those patients really understanding that they have been labelled as ‘psychiatric patients’.
This is a description most of them would strongly resent and resist, but the situation has been achieved by quietly converting our over-worked friendly family doctor into a purveyor of psychiatric drugs by some very clever, “softly-softly-catchy-monkey” marketing ploys, which even our local G.P. is not fully aware of.
WHY ?
For the same reason that the psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity has convinced the NHS to base government anti-drug treatment policy on prescribing methadone to heroin addicts at taxpayer expense.
For the same reason that the psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity has convinced the DfES to permit the prescription and dispensing of addictive drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac), dexamphetamine (Dexedrine), methylphenidate hydrochloride (Ritalin), at school to children labelled with a non-existent psychiatric illness known as ADHD, all paid for by the taxpayer.
And older people are prescribed so-called ‘sleeping pills’ which are in fact addictive psychiatric hypno-drugs paid for by the taxpayer.
The reason is, that users of addictive, habit forming and dependency inducing drugs are the very best consumers in the world. They have to have their regular dosage. But because heroin addicts, schoolchildren and older people can’t afford to pay for their drug consumption, our government departments have been persuaded to pay the pharmaceutical companies’ invoices out of taxpayer funds.
Because pharmaceutical manufacturers are not charities, it is the huge government GUARANTEED turnover, profit and payment in which they are interested.
WHO SET IT UP FOR THE PHARMAS?
Psychiatry of course. They are the U.K’s pushers of pharmaceutical prescription drugs, and are effectively kept in business by the pharmacologists who keep coming up with new ‘psychiatric drugs’ for them to introduce into the medical sector for prescription by doctors to as many potential users for whom the government can be persuaded to pay.
A century ago we had medicines, and medicines were for helping bodies to heal them- selves. But after the ’39 / ’45 war, chemical companies wanted to expand and as the ‘physical health market’ was getting a little over-supplied some pharmacologists got together with psychiatric friends to explore the ‘mental health market’.
They recognised that chemical stimulation and / or suppression of certain physical organs – mainly the central nervous system and the brain - could produce reactions which appeared to control emotional states – just like cannabis, amphetamines, heroin and cocaine appear to do. They also noted that the euphoric states produced by such drugs made the users come back for repeat doses time and time again.
But that was an illegal market, so what could they legally produce to provide themselves with a share of the obviously lucrative addictive drug market? Lucrative because an addicted consumer who MUST have a given product is the most valuable customer in the world – if he can pay.
Methadone was one of their first offerings. Here was a drug which gave similar ‘highs’ to heroin, but 2 or 3 times each day a heroin user requires another dose to combat the withdrawal symptoms which start to set in after 8 to 12 hours, whereas methadone is a more powerful and longer lasting drug, its withdrawal symptoms not starting to appear for some 24 hours.
But the problem is that addicts can’t pay and, in any event, who are they, where are they and how do you reach them to sell your methadone to them. Furthermore, the route to the consumer had to be a legal one, otherwise the pharmas would be nothing more than illicit drug pushers in white laboratory coats and drug barons in business suits.
As a consequence the pharmaceutical marketing men came up with methadone as a so-called ‘harm reduction’ answer to the nation’s drug problems.
Because in the field of medicine and chemistry most politicians are amateurs, they were soon persuaded to listen to the ‘experts’ in the pharmaceutical industry, who laid out their strategy for increasing their pharmaceutical turnover and profit in the guise of a strategy to handle the country’s drug problems.
Whether the strategy they have ‘sold’ to succeeding governments was ever workable in the first place is another question. But one thing is certain. They left the government in the shape of the NHS to do the work of identifying the drug users and dispensing the methadone to them, and so we have an over-abundance of DoH officials and physicians essentially working to develop as many sales of methadone as possible.
Here are the parts of the strategy which were revealed to politicians and civil servants:
* Methadone was recommended to government by the psycho-pharms as definitely
procuring abstinence from drugs for life via “a methadone reduction programme”.
* Methadone was recommended to government as stopping heroin usage.
* Methadone was recommended to government as so-called “harm reduction”.
* Methadone was recommended to government as permitting opiate users to live a
“basically normal life” in full time employment.
* Methadone was recommended to government by the psycho-pharms as helping to
restore family relationships.
* Methadone was recommended to government by the psycho-pharms as reducing crime by stopping heroin usage.
No wonder our politicians bought it. As the psycho-pharms intended, it was in many ways the answer to government prayers, at least in respect of opiate addiction.
However, as was revealed by the “BIG ISSUE in the North” survey of August 1999, (see Chapter 3.) whilst the psycho-pharm developed strategy sold (and still sells) millions of pounds worth of methadone to our Department of Health each and every day, it totally failed (and still fails) to achieve even one of the above promised results.
Also sold to our political decision-makers was the idea that heroin addiction is by far the major drug menace, and so, because the psycho-pharms have not yet thought of an immediately profitable way to handle dependency on cannabis, cocaine and crack, etc., etc., we have no government policies for handling addiction to these additional addictive drugs - other than law enforcement.
Of course, the psycho-pharms do have a long term strategy for handling addiction to these other drugs. Its called legalisation and it will without doubt be profitable
Any drug which reduces the awareness, consciousness or alertness of the user, has also to a greater or lesser degree hypnotised him, and made that user more susceptible to control by command - and this is particularly true of those drugs listed as ‘hypnotics’.
The Benzodiazepines for example operate on the Central Nervous System and are the most commonly used hypnotic drugs, and those who have used or have cared for benzo users will have recognised their hypnotic effect and we all know the power which hypnosis can have to command a person.
"Ah", you may say, "but there is no one doing any hypnotising - they're just being given a pill". Well the reason the British National Formulary describes a class of drugs as "hypnotics", is because when a person is under the influence of a hypnotic drug - such as the benzos - when they have been taking such drugs, they are very prone to accepting any verbal statement made in their presence - as a command for them to execute !
Furthermore, when the doctor or psychiatrist says: "Take these 3 times a day", this is much more than just a command they will obey. IT IS ALSO ONE OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF ADDICTION - because that command hypno-psychologically reinforces the physically addictive demand which the body builds up for that drug.
And it's not just the physician. We all help it along. Because when a patient is on one of the seven main benzos - or any of the other dozen or so main hypnotic drugs - then - your word is usually their command ! And when you say to Mum or Grandad: "Come on now, you know you should take your medicine" - boy does that have an unseen and powerful impact on them which you never intended!
This power of hypnotic drugs to control a user’s life is known about but seldom mentioned by the psych-pharm fraternity. This is because, in addition to it forming a basis for psychological dependency, as the proportion of drug users in our society increases year by year, it can be used as a population control mechanism in many ways.
For instance, newspaper, radio and particularly T.V. advertisements for pain killers and other over-the-counter chemist shop products can be given a considerable turnover boost every time a viewing prescribed hypnotic drug user is told: “Buy Now”. But the power of the hypnotic command is not just confined to selling goods. Political statements can also be more easily marketed to an increasingly suggestion susceptible population.
Alarming? Exaggerated? Far fetched? Well let’s look at history.
The dictionary tells us that the word “assassin” is derived from “hashish-eaters”: i.e. “Arab / Moslem fanatics in the time of the Crusades who were sent by their leaders to murder Christian leaders by ‘treacherous violence’”. They were prepared for their task by ingesting drugs – mainly Indian hemp which we know today as cannabis.
Today, although seldom mentioned in the media, drugs once again rear their heads in relation to terrorist suicide bombers. And can one believe that the trainers of today’s assassins are not more sophisticated than their forefathers from the Middle Ages.
Cannabis, heroin and a wide range of easily obtainable prescription hypnotic drugs are available to these attackers, and there is a similar range of anxiolytics and pain-killers which can be used to reduce the stress a would be suicide needs to confront.
The hypnotics lay individuals wide open to destructive or suicidal suggestions which they probably otherwise would not take on board or act upon. Even low strength cannabis, the benzos and other tranquillisers, when coupled with the repetition of certain concepts, chants or commands will eventually serve to have a subject carry out actions which he would not contemplate had he never been drugged or hypnotised.
People with terrorists living in their communities do not easily recognise a person under the command of drug-induced hypnosis because – remember – these drugs are prescribed to calm the users down, make them placid and difficult to recognise as harmful. In addition, in our increasingly bio-chemical society, there are many other locals as equally ‘spaced-out’ as would-be suicide bombers.
Concurrently with, or following on from, methadone we have the near indiscriminate prescribing of benzos by insufficiently warned G.Ps. We have the prescribing of ecstasy and cocaine like drugs to our school-children, and all these billions of pounds worth of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs have several things in common.
* They make worse the problem they are supposed to be solving,
*
They are paid for by our
* They make huge profits for the national and international psycho-pharmaceutical companies,
* They cost the British taxpayer a further fortune in administering present policies, and,
* They cost us another fortune in unemployment benefits, housing support, income support, child benefits and extra medical services to those affected by such drugs.
Psycho-pharm policies are not working. They do for the psych-pharms, but not for the British public or the taxpayers.
SO . . . . . . . . . ISN’T IT TIME FOR A CHANGE ?
© Copyright C.E..P.T.A. and E. Kenneth Eckersley, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 & 2005. All World Rights Reserved
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