Your Ref:DE00000664523 – DE00000664523
Dear Bilal Ghafoor,
Thank you for your email of 5 January 2012 in response to my letters to Anne Milton and Earl Howe.
In your email you stated that “we would be grateful if you could review the answers that have already been provided to you and list all outstanding questions so that I can ensure that a final response is sent to you, enabling us to bring correspondence on the issues raised to a close.”
Can you tell me how a Customer Services Centre has the authority to declare the issue of involuntary tranquilliser addiction closed or dictate that the Department’s next response will be a final one when this issue is still ongoing? I am attending a meeting with Anne Milton at the end of this month to further discuss it.
For my own part, I have been drugged unnecessarily for 34 years by the health service by a tranquilliser which had inadequate warnings for the first eighteen years of its authorisation and which was only supposed to be prescribed for two weeks. I have suffered a protracted and continuing acute withdrawal unsupported by the health service with no treatment; I still suffer from many symptoms after 22 months drug free, including headaches, anxiety, concentration problems, feelings of pressure in the head, tinnitus, chronic fatigue, dizziness, breathlessness, nausea, restless legs to name but a few, none of which I had before. These are all classic benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms and are all new symptoms. I am still unable to work and have used a considerable amount of my retirement savings in order to support myself. No one in the health service can tell me if or when I will recover.
This issue is certainly not closed for me or the million plus other patients on long term prescriptions, in withdrawal or post withdrawal. You state that you have consistently answered my questions, and when I am well enough I will resubmit all the questions I consider unanswered.
In the meantime, I asked in my last correspondence for a list of dedicated involuntary tranquilliser addiction services nationwide, the existence of which the Department and Earl Howe have given assurances on more than one occasion. The Department has been asked for this list many times and in its response has given four wrong numbers and contacts which prove not to provide those services. This is one example of not answering questions.
This list has been requested on more than one occasion and would you therefore please provide me with one now?
How can you offer to answer previous questions when you have not even answered this one from my last letter?
Yours sincerely,
John Perrott