Hundreds of thousands of Dutch taking addictive sleeping pills for longer than safe

Hundreds of thousands of Netherlands residents have been taking addictive sleeping pills and tranquilizers for longer than is safe. Patients should take medicines from the benzodiazepine group for no longer than two weeks, but hundreds of thousands take them for months on end. Over 125,000 people have been taking these pills for over a year, Trouw reports based on figures from the Foundation of Pharmaceutical Characteristics (SFK).

Last year, over 1.2 million Dutch people were prescribed these drugs. 410,300 people took them for over four months, another 272,100 for over eight months, and 125,100 for more than a year. The effectiveness of the pills decreases rapidly, which increases the risk of addiction.

The guidelines of the Dutch Society of General Practitioners (NHG) state that doctors must prevent “chronic use.” The general rule is prescribing only five to ten tablets once-off and GPs are obliged to discuss tapering off with a patient if they have been taking benzodiazepine for more than 60 days in three months.

The NHG could not tell Trouw whether GPs adhere to this guideline. “We cannot look into the consultation room,” a spokesperson said. The association acknowledged that there are “bottlenecks” in the implementation of the guideline, partly because GPs don’t always have enough time with a patient to help them taper off their intake.

In 2009, the government took measures to prevent benzodiazepine addiction. Since then, these medicines have generally not been covered by the basic health insurance package. According to SFK’s figures, last year over 800,000 patients paid for benzodiazepine themselves. Another 400,000 got it reimbursed from their health insurers, typically because they have a permanent anxiety disorder or epilepsy - the two main ways to still get this medicine through health insurance.

“Unnecessary long-term use is undesirable due to possible dependency,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Health, Welfare, and Sports told Trouw in response to the SFK figures. The Ministry attributes the high use mainly to GPs being too overworked to help patients reduce their benzodiazepine intake. The Ministry still expects that GPs will start seriously working on phasing out these addictive substances. The spokesperson referred to agreements made last year to give GPs more time per patient.