Replica Watches,Wemen's Handbags,Fashion Shoes

Byline: by Kathryn Knight

NONE of the friends she was lunching with that day could have even imagined Marianne James's sense of dread as she stared into her handbag and realised she'd run out of her 'fix'.

The pounding headache and dull ache in the small of her back were already taking hold, as well as a shakiness in her legs.

Making her excuses, 39-year-old Marianne drove 'in a blind panic' not, as one might suspect, to her drug dealer, but to an out-oftown supermarket, where she could get what she needed.

There, in a perfectly ordinary transaction costing under [pounds sterling]5, she bought a 32-pill pack of painkillers, gulping down six in one go. In common with many drug addicts, Marianne said this week that while she knew it 'wasn't normal', she couldn't help herself. 'I kept telling myself that I'd sort it out soon.'

The legal secretary was in the grip of addiction, one that lasted three years and needed at its height 'feeding' with between 48 and 60 tablets a day. That her drug of choice could be bought over the counter had not only facilitated her habit, but also allowed her to be in denial for many months.

Marianne doesn't look like a drug addict. Slim, blonde, smartly dressed, with a loving husband and two sons aged eight and six, she works for a firm of solicitors and lives in a picturesque Hertfordshire village.

Nonetheless, that is what she was -- in the grip of what could be dubbed the 'silent addiction', one played out not in seedy crack dens but in cul-desacs and avenues across Britain.

Like thousands of other unregistered and unrecorded addicts up and down the country, Marianne was hooked on codeine, the key ingredient in extra-strength painkillers, Silver Rings Jewellery and a member of the opiate family of drugs.

By its very nature, it is hard to pinpoint the exact numbers who are reliant on its comforting shroud, although a conference of the General Medical Association in 2004 suggested there might be as many as 50,000 painkiller abusers.

Last month, however, a new report, published by an all-party Parliamentary group, attempted to highlight the subject. Chaired by Bolton South- East MP Dr Brian Iddon, the group spent a year researching addiction to over-the-counter as well as prescription drugs, and were shocked by the scale of what they found.

'For more than a decade, I have felt that the misuse of prescription and over-the-counter drugs has been a much larger problem than most people admit, and our research has backed that up,' Dr Iddon told me.

'I was shocked by the extent of it.

There were a lot of very sad stories and we cannot afford to ignore what they are telling us.' Many of these experiences are poignantly Fashion Clothing similar, starting out with an innocent trip to the pharmacist to remedy an ache or pain for which one doesn't want to trouble the doctor, but then descending into dependency.

It is an outcome Marianne recognises all too well. Her problems started three years ago, after she started to take a codeine-containing painkiller for painful periods which developed after the birth of her second child.

'At first, they were a lifesaver because I used to suffer terribly every month, but they also gave me a lift, and I started to take them regularly,' she says. After a few months, she switched to Nurofen Plus when she realised it contained 12.8mg of codeine per tablet compared to the 8m
Other articles:
http://www.faldw.cn/Blog/View/?531
http://blog.66wz.com/?uid-322106-action-viewspace-itemid-459721