Page 504 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 1993
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In those circumstances, it is appropriate that people seek assistance to help them with that dependence. It seems that for most people it is almost impossible to simply say, "Yes, I have a dependence. No, I am not going to take any more of these drugs". Unlike cigarettes, even though that addiction is considered to be one of the most difficult to remove, if you simply go off the benzodiazepines they can damage you. So there are some dangers associated with that.
One of the difficulties the committee had was that we felt that we did not have enough knowledge about what was going on in the ACT as far as benzodiazepines go. Our initial reaction was that we should be in a position to commission an epidemiological study that would provide for us the research and the information we needed to be able to make stronger recommendations than we have. The way the committees are set up, the way the committees are funded, made that impossible. I think it is a matter for you as Speaker and for members to consider whether committees should be able to commission research in order to provide them with some answers.
The course we took was to put the responsibility back to the Minister for Health and his department, as it will be shortly. We have recommended that more information be gained on the extent of benzodiazepine dependence and usage in the ACT. Recommendation 1 is for a comprehensive epidemiological study of benzodiazepine usage - I imagine that there will be some in this Assembly and some support workers who will have difficulty reading that sentence - including prescribing and dispensing practices in the ACT, to be commissioned by the ACT Department of Health. We then go on to talk about other ways of getting this information and maintaining it. One of those is to ask the Department of Health to maintain quarterly statistics on prescriptions and dispensing of benzodiazepines per 1,000 of the population. The third prong is to assess the amount of usage of benzodiazepines in our public hospital system.
We believe that it is appropriate to take that approach because we need to understand the extent of usage and how long people are using benzodiazepines - and it is very important to be able to determine both of those things - in order to assess the extent of the problem. The only way we can get a real indication of the problem in the ACT is to find the number of people who are already dependent. Some of those people present themselves for COPE programs and to drug referral information centres and places such as that. However, we feel that we are not reaching a number of people who are living quite comfortably but are dependent upon benzodiazepines - perhaps they use Serepax regularly and cannot stop.
It is interesting that this set of drugs do not in any way focus on a lower socioeconomic group in the population, as is the case for some of the other drugs we have dealt with. We believe that this set of drugs is very widespread across the population, but that information needs to be verified. The information we have at this stage is anecdotal, although supported by a range of evidence from other places where research is done from which we can extrapolate. We do not know how often it applies. We have been given anecdotal evidence about secretaries of departments and a whole range of people who have found themselves dependent on such drugs.
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