"My estimate is that at least 2,000 Canadians died on these drugs [SSRIs, a type of anti-depressant] over and above the number who would have actually died if they had been left untreated. And that figure could rise as high as … 6,000 people. So we are looking at two or three per week, at least, since these drugs came on the market first, or perhaps as high as one per day.

It’s either one twin-tower episode or two twin-tower episodes.

If it had been a thing like the twin towers, if it had been a plane that had gone down and 50 to 100 people had got killed, there’d be pressure on the politicians to be seen to do something. What you're having happen here is, one person dies here, one person dies there … and people actually don’t see it as the kind of problem they need to do anything about."

  –Dr. David Healy, director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Wales, College of Medicine. He's also the author of The Anti-Depressant Era and The Creation of Psycho-pharmacology, and Let them Eat Prozac. Jan. 28, 2004

Vanessa Young

"... the effectiveness of the [adverse drug reaction reporting] system is compromised by low reporting rates. Some international studies estimate reporting rates as low as one to 10 per cent, and there is no reason to suspect that Canadian rates are higher."

  –From Health Canada's "Response to the Recommendations to Health Canada of the Coroner's Jury Investigation into the Death of Vanessa Young" (August 27, 2002)

"If you have a product and you say, 'Well it has shown to have x number of adverse events associated with it and I want to take that off the market,' there are other patients that may need that and actually have derived benefit from that. … It’s a balancing of what the benefits are versus what the risks are, not for only one given patient but for the population as a whole."

  –Dr. Supriya Sharma, Health Canada, Feb. 13, 2004

  –Terence Young, father of Vanessa Young, who died in his arms from, he says, an adverse reaction to the drug Prepulsid. Jan 30, 2004

"I’m somebody who is interested in this. I write about this. I ‘ve followed this for a long time…. Post-marketing adverse events are very important. I try to make sure I try to communicate that in my medical column to other physicians, to put the adverse events that are new into context, and to remind them about things they should probably know a little bit more about. And yet I find, even for myself, I’ve not reported adverse events that I should have reported, simply because there are so many demands on my time…. I haven’t got around to it because patients come first."

  –Dr. Eric Wooltorton, physician and an associate editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Feb. 16, 2004

"We know that 51 per cent of approved drugs have serious side effects not detected before marketing approval."

"Eighty per cent or so of Canadians are very happy with the way Health Canada puts out warnings."

  –Dr. Chris Turner, director-general of the Marketed Health Products Directorate. From testimony given at the Coroner's inquest into the death of Ashley Atkinson, Nov. 12, 2002

  –Source: "Functional Review of Post-Approval Drug Assessment Operational Activities for Therapeutic Products Programme, Bureau of Drug Surveillance." Prepared for Dr. Christopher Turner, then the manager of the Continuing Assessment Division. Prepared by the HDP Group Inc. (Ottawa), 1999.