DESPITE the irresponsible and scaremongering headlines in many a national newspaper — and I have not bothered to read any further — I fully accept that most GPs’ surgeries are clean, tidy and discreet and that they keep medication safely.

By the admission of the body concerned, those initially investigated by no means represented a cross section of such practices.

All this is, however, largely a red herring, it being ‘inter-alia’ the indiscriminate manner in which (particularly but not exclusively), psychotropic drugs are still being prescribed, notwithstanding frantic campaigning on my part and that of others, that constitutes the tragic and despicable problem.

“How I leave my country!”

As far as I know, not the dying words of Nelson Mandela.

DAVID DIMENT Riverside Court Oxford