Prescription Drugs Are The Leading Cause Of Death

Overtreatment with drugs kills many people, and the death rate is increasing. It is therefore strange that we have allowed this long-lasting drug pandemic to continue, and even more so because most of the drug deaths are easily preventable.

Psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death.

In 2013, I estimated that our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer,1 and in 2015, that psychiatric drugs alone are also the third leading cause of death.

In the US, it is commonly stated that our drugs are "Only" the fourth leading cause of death.

In another large, matched cohort study, the appendix to the study report shows that hypnotics quadrupled the death rate.26 These authors estimated that sleeping pills kill between 320,000 and 507,000 Americans every year.26 A reasonable estimate of the annual death rate would therefore be 2%. For SSRIs, a UK cohort study of 60,746 depressed patients older than 65 showed that they led to falls and that the drugs kill 3.6% of patients treated for one year.27 The study was done very well, e.g. the patients were their own control in one of the analyses, which is a good way to remove the effect of confounders.

I therefore do not doubt that psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

Many commonly used drugs other than those mentioned above can cause dizziness and falls, e.g. anticholinergic drugs against urinary incontinence and dementia drugs, which are used by 1% and 0.5% of the Danish population, respectively, even though they do not have any clinically relevant effects.

It is difficult to know what the exact death toll of our drugs is, but there can be no doubt that they are the leading cause of death. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/prescription-drugs-are-the-leading-cause-of-death/