These Pills Could Be Next U.S. Drug Epidemic,

[barq2]

Sometimes I am surprised at how poorly informed journalists are, will they do it on purpose? It is really exaggerated

Most journalists are arts graduates, so don't have a science background. I'm not having a go at arts subjects, we need them as part of a healthy society. My bugbear is when articles claim "[x substance] is discovered to increase [a specific] cancer by 50%!". But they don't tell you that the specific type of cancer is incredibly rare, so an extra 50% of that is tiny.

Scientists and people working in press offices for universities are trying to put out information in ways that is less open to being misinterpreted (wilfully or through lack of knowledge). The reason I don't get used by the media any more is that my answers almost always start with the words "Well, it's a bit more complicated than that...", which the press don't like!

I've seen a lot worse than the original article. The things I'd pick up are:

• This isn't new, and I think US doctors have been perfectly aware benzos are addictive since the 90s
  
• The 2/3rds increase between 1996 and 2013 correlates with an increase in mental health problems, so it doesn't mean these extra 6m cases of prescription of benzos are inappropriate. People are incredibly stressed these days, especially since the 2008 economic crisis.
  
• Polydrug use/abuse is a problem and I'm not denying the dangers of multiple CNS depressants. In the article they've taken deaths and looked at where a benzo is present, now that's not the same as saying it was the cause of death (correlation is not proof of causation). How many of those people would also have tested positive for SSRIs? Also it doesn't consider the relative half-lives of different drugs. You could take diazepam a week ago and still test positive for it, but are clinicians saying that is a meaningful contributor to a death (a week later)?
  

In the UK there are already very top down directives about the prescribing of benzos, and from this it looks like the USA could get the same at state level. At least there is some acknowledgement of tapering, in the UK far too many people have not only lost benzo scripts that genuinely helped them, but also been tapered VERY fast (or not at all in a few cases).