A CORRESPONDENT chides me for calling the regulations about tranquillisers
lax, when in fact they are non-existent. The regulations to which I was referring were those which insist that a doctor's prescription must be obtained before the drug can be bought in a chemist's shop: the laxity, to my mind, being that—as our correspon- dent himself suggests—doctors are allowed to prescribe them who have no knowledge of their risks. I mentioned last week the report in the BMJ of an experiment which showed that of various tranquillisers tested, only one had any positive value; most of the rest gave patients no benefit—and no doubt some of them also had bad side-effects. How many of these drugs have been,. and are still being, prescribed? What is the profession doing to ensure that drugs which are found worthless are not prescribed? Are there adequate arrangements for independent testing of such drugs before they are brought into use? And I might even ask if—as seemed to be quite a prevalent opinion at the British Medical Association's gathering last week—whisky is just as good a tranquilliser as any tranquilliser, what does the profession propose to do to publicise the fact?
Previous page
