I love Big Pharma. After getting a masters degree in drug design, I was fortunate enough to work within their stinky labs and learn the inner workings of corporate drug making (and dealing). My most important lesson: Not all drugs are bad. Some are really bad. Take the so-called antidepressant Prozac as an example…
Because of the FDA’s concerns, drug manufacturers have revised their warning labels to state that young adults — 18-24 years old — may be at an elevated risk of suicidal thought and behavior while using these medications.
Approximately 41 percent of our military forces serving on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq are within this same age range. In addition, 40 percent of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 are believed to have taken some type of anti-depressant medication.
Where once drugs were seen as poisons to be used judiciously and with caution, they are now treated as fertilisers whose more or less indiscriminate use can only do good. Where once farmers knew to keep their cattle out of fields growing the serotonin reuptake inhibiting weed, St John’s Wort, as it caused miscarriages, under industry influence women have been herded by doctors in exactly the opposite direction.
Since the horror of the Thalidomide scandal in the 1960s, pharmaceutical companies and medicines regulators have been acutely aware of the dangers drugs may pose to the unborn child.
Fox News just informed viewers that 27 million Americans are being treated for depression. The Washington Times ran a three-part series this week on the tsunami of mental illness in New Orleans four years after Hurricane Katrina, mostly depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A rash of additional articles has appeared nationwide on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), including one from last Sunday’s (August 2) Washington Times “Pure suffering for OCD Patients,” by Cheryl Weinstein. All news sources, regardless of political persuasion, lend the aura of medical legitimacy to these phenomena.