Eric Ollerenshaw MP 20 Greenacre Court
House of Commons Lancaster
London LA1 4LE
SWIA 0AA
1st December 2010
Dear Eric,
I kindly request that you endorse the following complaint against the Department of Health; please forward my correspondence and that of my partner Stephanie Holliday to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman as a formal complaint.
I first contacted you in March of this year as an ex-involuntary addict of the tranquilliser Ativan/lorazepam for 35 years. I had to use voluntary organisations for advice and support as my PCT was unable to offer safe withdrawal treatment. I have now been off this drug for 9 months and still have significant withdrawal symptoms as do many other people I know, some 20 years after discontinuation.
As you aware I have written to the Department of Health many times since February 2010 regarding widespread involuntary benzodiazepine addiction. The Department’s responses to date have contained misleading information and the Department has not answered the majority of my questions by reference to their current review of addiction to prescription and over-the-counter drugs. This review is meaningless to patients like me and the Department appears to be using it to avoid answering questions. It is important that the issues I have raised with the Department are considered now before completion of the review because they are not included in the review’s programme of work and they will otherwise never be considered.
The Department has also given misleading statements about the progress of the review and I established through an FOI request that no work had been carried out on this review for a year from July 2009. This FOI response revealed that the Department had misled me for 5 months by giving me the impression that they were carrying out work and using that work as an excuse not to answer my questions.
The Department also stated that it did not know the true extent of addiction to prescription drugs. I have since found out through another FOI document (a Departmental briefing to Gillian Merron MP, then Public Health Minister, prior to a visit to Oldham Benzo Withdrawal Clinic on Monday 21st September 2009) that the Department was aware of the scale of addiction since at least September 2009. The Department has also used its intention to carry out an audit of addiction as another excuse to ignore my questions.
The Department has also deliberately confused my precisely worded questions in order to avoid answering them. An example of this is when I asked by what authority Dora East of the Department was speaking for Professor Field, Chair RCGP, when she stated that he was not ‘speaking in an official capacity’ when he stated that patients could ‘get hooked in 3-4 days’. Bilal Ghafoor for the Department dismissed this question with a short and irrelevant answer and still did not answer my original question which concerned BNF guidelines.
It is my view that the Department and its regulatory agency the MHRA are biased favourably towards the pharmaceutical manufacturers of these benzodiazepine drugs and intend to ‘close down’ any concerns raised by patients like myself with tactics of feigned concern, formulaic responses, misinformation and ignoring questions.
The result of this is that benzodiazepine tranquilliser victims like me are receiving a poor service, have been marginalised as a group and have been deprived of effective and safe NHS treatment.
I would like all the unanswered questions I have asked the Department answered properly and truthfully.
Yours sincerely
John Perrott