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…
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.
GPs are still prescribing an antidepressant known to cause birth defects in unborn children to thousands of women every year, it emerged last night. Pills such as Seroxat may result in babies being born with malformed hearts if taken in the first few weeks of pregnancy – a time when many women are still unaware they may have conceived.
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.
Thousands of women in the UK may be taking antidepressants prescribed by their GPs without knowing that the pills, which are hard to stop taking, could cause birth defects in unborn children. The problems relate to a class of drug known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), which includes Prozac and, in particular, the British-made Seroxat.