We are hooked. We are pill-popping people, gobbling down antidepressants, painkillers and antibiotics as if they were sweets. As with gun crime or obesity, we are following where the Americans have led. Last week Heath Ledger, the actor dead at 28, became the symbol of a new culture of pharmaceutical recreation. He accidentally poisoned himself with “anti-anxiety medication”. You could indeed hardly make it up.
But the real problem is not one of the affluent or the famous. It is the routine use of legal drugs that should really alarm us – cases like the one reported recently of a woman from Lancashire who was taking up to 64 Nurofen Plus tablets a day, a habit that killed her. The problem is just as serious with prescription drugs. A commons committee has attacked GPs for overprescribing, ignoring advice about how long the strongest tranquillisers should be used for. Apparently the Home Office blames these drugs, benzodiazepines, for up to 17,000 deaths since they were introduced in the 60s.
