Posts tagged - drugs

Addicts are Slaves and Oregon is Abetting the Trade

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I was born in Portland, Ore., met my wife there, have family who live there and have visited many times over the years. But I no longer recognize the city I once loved, the city with bright lights, clean streets and busy people. The last time I visited, the sidewalks and parks were jammed with homeless people, alleys strewn with garbage, and businesses boarded up. I watched the news during months of rioting in which my church and many other buildings were covered with plywood to protect them from window-smashing looters who emerged at night to raise hell.

Last month, the New York Times published a story in which a reporter and photographer followed a Portland security guard on his rounds as he encountered drug addicts, psychotic people, overdose deaths and foiled an attempted kidnapping as a crazy woman tried to snatch a child she insisted was hers. His 911 calls were answered by a recording and were sometime seven  disconnected, as overwhelmed police officers struggled to keep up.

So what changed in the last few decades? Drugs. Apathy. Stupid legislation. Degradation.

Oregon, described in a PBS News Hour episode as “On the leading edge of drug decriminalization,” decriminalized marijuana in 1973,and legalized medical marijuana in 1998. In 2011, The Global Commission on Drug Policy decreed that “The global war on drugs has failed,” which gave permission for states to throw up their hands gut their drug enforcement efforts and follow Oregon’s lead, reducing penalties, legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use, opening so called “harm reduction” centers in which addicts could shoot up with clean needles and get a dose of naloxone if they overdosed, all without fear of arrest. Taxes on marijuana sales, the theory went, could fund mental health and drug treatment, and everything would be rosy.

Oregon continued its “leading edge” position, and passed measure 110, decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. Also in 2020 Oregon voters approved measure 109, the first measure in the United States that established a regulatory framework for the use of psychedelic mushrooms.

I was at university in the 1960s so I experienced a thriving drug culture, and yes, I did inhale, but the harsh 3 Percent THC marijuana seeds and stems of the 1960s have evolved into something cultivated, much stronger and available legally from thousands of weed shops on street corners. The grim lessons of LSD, and other hard drugs have been forgotten by the present generation, and the tie-dyed hippies of the 1960s have been replaced by feces-stained homeless drug addicts junking up many cities such as Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.

Read the NYTimes story on Portland and you can see that the security guard treats the homeless gently, gives them cigarettes, works to de-escalate conflicts and problems, and one can also see that those people are not generally intent on damage. They are however, “on something” which puts them beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. In pursuit of humane treatment, in making drug addiction an “illness” instead of a criminal act, we are losing our cities to the insane, the destructive, the addicted and the degenerate. Ordinary people have a right to walk the sidewalks without being accosted, without being hassled or screamed at, without being forced to walk in the street to avoid needle-strewn trash and human feces.

And around the state, as overdose deaths spike, Marion, Polk, Jackson and Coos Counties are trying to rescind Measure 110.

And one more thing: It didn’t help when Oregon Public Broadcasting – reporting on efforts to rescind Measure 110 – headlined its story: “Efforts to recriminalize drugs again, supporters include Oregon’s richest businessmen.”  The headline tried to make it into a class war where once again the “fat cats” are stepping on the little guys. It doesn’t take a fat wallet to look around and see what’s happening to our cities and to Portland, all it takes is a walk in the park with eyes open. Addicts are slaves and the Oregon Legislature is abetting this despicable trade.

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BigPharma in the Bedroom

Sasin Tipchaia from Pixabay

The FDA has approved another drug to hype up sexual desire. The drug, bremolanotide, is injected before sex and if it becomes a big hit, could make billions for the drug company. But there are reasons to be skeptical, primary among which are that we’ve been down that road before with tragic or really stupid results.

In high school, for example, the big deal among boys was Spanish Fly. Nobody ever knew where to get it, maybe in Tijuana, but supposedly it made girls want to have sex. Evidently it did exist, but was made from the juice of a blister beetle, and worked on men at least, by burning the urethra. But you know, people peed blood and sometimes died, and so Spanish Fly got a bad reputation.

And then there were the so-called “date rape drugs,” dropped into alcoholic drinks. They didn’t make people want sex, but it did render them confused or unconscious so they couldn’t say no. But since rape is a felony, one of the side effects was 15-20 years of hard time in prison for the rapist, and a pretty horrible experience for the victim.

And then came Viagra, approved by the FDA in 1998 so that guys at least could have more fun with a prescription. Some hoped that the quest for rhinoceros horn might be over. But the pills cost $65 each, weren’t covered by insurance, and erections lasting more than four hours could pool blood in the penis and starve it of oxygen leading to – you guessed it – very bad things.

But Viagra didn’t work for the ladies, and so the men in white coats went back to work on the mother lode of drugs — what could be the biggest blockbuster drug in history.

For example, in 2010, the FDA was considering approving something dubbed “female Viagra.” The drug, flibanserin, was originally developed as an antidepressant, but it didn’t work and in fact had depression as a side effect. So with the bright idea to market it as a female aphrodisiac, Boehringer Ingelheim tried to get it approved by the FDA for that purpose. But the FDA said no two times, development stopped, and the drug was sold to Sprout Pharmaceuticals.

Sprout began a marketing campaign painting it in gender-equity colors, sponsoring studies that created “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” as a disease and invented the slogan “Even the Score.” The FDA approved the drug in 2015, and two days later, Sprout sold out to Valeant Pharmaceuticals for a cool billion dollars.

But the drug didn’t do so well, as efficacy was small compared to placebos, cost $400 per month, and had side effects of nausea, dizziness, sleepiness, depression, etc. And while flibanserin must be taken daily, it could not be taken with alcohol, which was a real buzz kill. It sold for a measly $10 million, which in the pharmaceutical game is peanuts. A total flop.

But BigPharma could sense blood in the water, and it went back to the bedroom and came up with the latest miracle aphrodisiac, bremolanotide. Early research shows little difference in effect from a placebo. And the question remains: can an expensive drug make up for something missing in the complexities of human relationships?

Sex should be pleasurable, nature intended it that way to continue the species. And marriage was instituted to protect and care for the next generation. But BigPharma looks at human beings as nothing more than meat bodies, collections of stimulus-response neurons, synapses and chemicals just waiting for the right pharmaceutical magic wand to lift life to higher levels of awareness, creativity and tenderness.

But it doesn’t work that way. Drugs, by their nature, go the other direction. And amping up sexual performance with Viagra, flibanserin or bremolanotide even if they did work, isn’t going to solve some of the biggest difficulties in society today: infidelity, broken marriages, STDs, single parent families and children in foster homes because of parents hooked on opioids or dead of overdoses. BigPharma had a role in all that too, so to expect the latest pill or needle to solve life’s complex difficulties is a bit simple-minded.

 

 

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The Drug Addiction Crisis is Your Fault

Uncle Sam PixabayBy now, everyone is convinced we are in a drug-addiction crisis, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Such as pharmaceutical companies that invented street drugs to begin with. Bayer once touted heroin for headaches,  Abbott Labs promoted methamphetamine as a remedy for alcoholism, Sandoz invented LSD, Merc invented morphine, distributed cocaine, and invented MDMA, and Purdue convinced doctors to prescribe OxyCodone for pain by assuring them that chances of addiction were very slim. And we can blame the doctors who ignored evidence to the contrary.

We can point the finger at pharmacies that order thousands more opioids than will be needed and fill prescriptions far above what makes sense. Pharmaceutical distributors that ignore huge orders for opioids from small pharmacies, and pressure legislators to pass bills that make the DEA impotent to enforce existing rules. DEA and FDA executives who jump ship to work for big pharma at huge increases in salary so they can help build strategies to circumvent legal restrictions on their activities. Psychiatrists and physicians who take money from big pharma and go on to promote medication assisted treatment not for detoxification, but as a permanent opioid-fueled future which will benefit pharmaceutical firms and their stockholders, who put addicts on naloxone and methadone which is much harder to detox than heroin, but has the advantage of diverting money from the street drug dealer to the pharmaceutical drug dealers and their investors. The pharmaceutical companies who invent drugs to block addiction to all but their own drugs, that block death on the street and then – aping the strategies of the most venial drug pushers – raise the prices multiple times, crying that “shortages exist, you’d better hurry!” Correctional institutions who embrace medication assisted treatment to medicate inmates instead of using incarceration as a period of drying out for later life, and did anyone mention investors in big pharma stocks because wow, riches await from more and more addicts using more and more pharmaceuticals?

And there’s plenty of blame for all those judges, doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists who help close the gap between prescription drugs and street drugs. For the military exhuming the abominations of MKULTRA by experimenting on those with PTSD, trying a little of this LSD, a little of that marijuana, some wires in the brain – who knows? We might find a way to create a new and better Manchurian Candidate, make robots out of soldiers, make mass murderers out of troubled spirits. And we can blame “non-profit organizations” like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who are spurring interest in using drugs to swap neuroses for outright insanity, organizations who secretly channel millions to legalize marijuana, to companies like Coca-Cola which once contained cocaine for a little boost, which is now going back to its roots, putting marijuana in its product. We can blame the legislators who get swept along in this tsunami of cash and influence, passing bills and listening to drug pushers in suits who convince them that it’s all good, and “here’s a little donation for your next campaign.” Psychiatrists who contend that everyone is basically nuts, so a little drug, a little electroshock, a little wire in the brain certainly couldn’t make you any worse…

But for all the blame to hand around, what about you? Do you know people who have their kids on speed (called ADHD medication by the shrinks)? Do you have a family member who is using marijuana or drinking too much? Are you on an anti-depressant because you feel bad sometimes? Do you get drunk on the weekends to unwind, or smoke a little weed, because after all, it’s legal now? Is your aged mother on “happy pills” so she won’t complain so much about the food, the loss of independence, the minimum-wage helpers telling her what to do in her assisted living facility? Do you nod sympathetically at people who start every conversation with “I’m ADHD” or “Since I was diagnosed with PTSD,” or “I’ve been depressed for some time now.”?

So what are you doing to help make things better? Is it all too big for you? Are you just one person? Are you in agreement with those who try to make addicts poor victims of the system? Who say that addiction, mental illness, criminality is all just a brain disease, not a choice, that we are all just victims of circumstance? We should all just go down the drain together and let the greatest country the world has ever seen evaporate like bong smoke.

Well, grow a pair why don’t you? Do something useful. Someone says. “I’ve got ADHD,” you can retort, “Who gave you that idea?” Someone says “I’m on an anti-depressant,” you can reply “What can you do to handle the situation that’s depressing you?” Someone says “marijuana is legal now, so it’s fine,” you say “So now the government has your best interests – and the taxes on weed – at heart?” Be blunt, invalidate those stupid ideas and self-victimization. Stigma is a good thing – it might help deter a kid thinking about drinking, or using meth or shooting up. Might keep him or her from ending up as a shit-stained twist of laundry in an alley somewhere, or a numbed-out methadone or pharmaceutical junkie for the rest of his or her life.

Do you vote a straight Democratic or Republican ticket, because you’re too lazy to read the voter guide? Or just not vote because there’s nothing you can do about it? Find out who’s taking money from big pharma, from the American Psychiatric Association, from the American Medical Association, the PACs and special interests and vote against them. Vote for those you think might not be in step with a stupider society.

Support religion and spiritual awareness and don’t fall for the efforts to pit one group against another. Support groups that help families, that repair marriages, that support kids and adoption and good education and a prosperous future – and beware of the “everybody-will-agree-with-this” PR and feel-good empty words of the campaign trail. Evaluate the politically correct movements to see if they lead to a better life and a better society, if they do, join, and if they don’t, oppose them even if you get hammered for it on social media.

There’s an old statement to the effect that “You get the government you deserve.” Look at what we’re getting and take some responsibility for it. It’s up to you not to your neighbors or your representatives. The left, the right, the middle, all political stripes have their own agendas, their own railroad tracks leading to their own little utopias. Do you want to travel with them? They make it easy, and they will appeal to your stupider self that thinks life consists of food, sleep and sex, and getting high can handle the rest, all funded by insurance, by taxes on “the fat-cat one percent” or the tiny fines on multi-billion-dollar drug firms.

So what can you do? Join up with effective organizations fighting stupidity and drug-induced dreaming not doing. Check out Foundation for a Drug-Free World, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and other effective anti-drug and anti-stupidity groups. Sure, the organizations I mentioned above are related to the Church of Scientology, and all the crap you’ve heard about Scientology? It’s a measure of just how effective these organizations are in enlightening people on the drug and psychiatric agenda. Those lies and smears in the media? A badge of honor. If they were ineffective, they would be ignored by the psych-drug-media cartel, or perhaps even supported by it.

OK, so this mess is not all your fault, but if everyone woke up and went into action, this drugged-up country could reboot and get back to some basic principles. There are 21 of those principles, and here’s a link to them. Good luck.

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Medical Soda, Recreational Soda?

Coke PixabayCoca Cola, whose sales have fallen rapidly in recent years,  is returning to its roots: harmful drugs. When Coca Cola was formulated back in the 1880s, it contained a bit of the old cocaine. Well, public outcry about addiction, etc. quashed that, but now that some states are legalizing weed, Coca Cola is checking out adding weed to their drink.  But not to worry, the company is careful to explain that they are looking at the non-psychoactive CBD oil. Want to bet that the CBD “Medical Coke” will evolve to the THC-laced “Recreational Coke?”

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Bad News for BigPharma

Pitchman PixabayAccording to Six Trends in ePharma Marketing, Embracing Digital Transformation in the Pharma and Healthcare Sectors, A Marketer’s Guide, some trends have developed which are alarming BigPharma but may spell relief to consumers. Among those are:

  1. Direct-to-Consumer television ads have lost their effectiveness and support. The American Medical Association supports a ban on prescription drug direct-to-consumer ads, and over a span of two years, consumers who asked their doctor about a drug advertised on TV dropped from 21 percent in 2015 to only 7 percent in 2017.
  2. Physicians have lost trust in BigPharma. According to ZS, the number of physicians who will meet with at least 70 percent of pharma sales reps who request a meeting has dropped to 44 percent, down from 80 percent in 2008.  And a Deloitte Consulting study revealed that 75 percent of physicians don’t entirely trust information that comes from BigPharma. In addition one-third of consumers blame doctors for the opioid crisis, so physicians are more wary of prescribing.
  3. Restrictions on social media advertising has forced BigPharma to resort to stealth advertising about wellness and conditions that only incidentally relate to a specific product. As STAT’s Rebecca Robbins explained, unbranded ads are “a stealthy and lightly regulated form of drug marketing focused on educating the public about a health condition — which the pharma company just happens to sell a product to treat.” In one month, for example, Merck spent an estimated $9.9m on ads on HPV and shingles, while Mylan spent an estimated $8.5m on ads about severe allergic reactions. Merck manufactures HPV and shingles vaccines, and Mylan manufactures the EpiPen, for severe allergic reactions.
  4. Drug-pricing controversies have put additional scrutiny on BigPharma from the public, government regulators and physicians.

However, BigPharma is busy exploiting some loopholes including:

  1. According to one survey, millennials are “by far the most receptive to pharmaceutical marketing” of any generation.
  2. Aggressive marketers can exploit electronic health records to influence providers through decision-support systems.
  3. And BigPharma’s pressure on physicians is relentless. According to ZS, each of the 26,000 prescribers contacted most frequently by pharma companies receive around 2,800 contacts per year from the pharmaceutical industry.

 

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A Drug-Free World isn’t Just Something You’re Smoking

drugfreeWatching the bad news about drugs, one could think the United States is circling the drain on its way to nodding oblivion. “The War on Drugs has been lost” is the theme, and the alternatives range from legalizing recreational marijuana,  following Oregon’s lead to “defelonize” hard drugs like heroin and meth,  using LSD and other psychedelics to “treat” crime, PTSD and depression, implementing “harm reduction” programs which supply clean needles and a “safe space to shoot up” for addicts, switching addicts from street drugs to pharmaceuticals in something called “Medication Assisted Treatment,” and so on.

One in six Americans is taking a psychiatric happy pill and more than eight million school kids are on psychiatric drugs to make them shut up and sit still. And 64,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016 alone.

And in spite of skyrocketing profits in the $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry, drug abuse is hitting the economy hard. About 1 million people were out of the workforce in 2015 because of opioid addiction, and in order to hire new employees, some companies have been forced to stop drug testing. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak not the evil word of stigma.”

According to the psychs, stigma is bad, because drug addiction is a brain disease not a moral failing. You catch it from your drug dealer, a friendly psychiatrist, or the people you smoke legal pot with who also have heroin, meth, Oxycodone and other fun stuff in their pockets.

So is the solution just giving up and legalizing everything?

One person who doesn’t think so is Meghan Fialkoff, who with her father took on drug addiction in New York City. She seems to think something can be done about it, and her Foundation for a Drug-Free World took on the challenge of educating kids about drugs. Fialkoff started with after-school programs for elementary kids in the Bronx and the program’s success began spreading.

“Just say no” isn’t enough, kids need to know why, and Fialkoff and her group has reached some 12 million people in New York with a “Just Say Know” message. According to a Scientology Network video, her organization partners with the NYPD, school safety officers, community groups, rappers, musicians, Miss New York and others.

In a recent survey, 81 percent of teens said they had the opportunity to use illicit drugs and more than half tried them. Fialkoff is determined to provide an information vaccination before that happens.

Changing a culture of drug abuse and drug tolerance requires a sea change, a reality adjustment, an awakening to a world of possibilities that in some cases has been plunged into the darkness of drugs.

The link between a culture awash in drugs and the next generation is the dealer looking for his next customers: “Hey kid, wanna try something fun?”

What will your child say?

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How to Get All Americans on Drugs

The problem we psychiatrists and pharmaceutical CEOs face is how to hook more than 323 million people in the United States.  Those 323 million people are living their lives and many don’t realize they should be on drugs. Fortunately, one in six are already taking psychoactive drugs, so the problem might not be so tough after all. That leaves some 270 million more to go. And a year ago, ABC News reported that: 21.5 million people aged 12 and older had a substance use disorder in 2014.

OK, so that leaves about 248 million total that aren’t on regular psychoactive drugs. About 40,000 people died last year of opioid overdoses, so that helps trim the odds, but it’s a slow process, and about 4 million babies were born in the same period, and even though from .06 percent to .34 percent of them were born addicted to opioids, they keep arriving and most are born clean. Luckily, kids – especially boys – don’t like to sit still and thus they drive teachers crazy, so we put at least 10 percent of the teachers on antidepressants and about 11 percent of children aged 4-17 are on ADHD drugs. As they get older, well, you know how teenagers love drugs!

By the time they get to be teenagers, 15 percent have all the indicators of lifetime alcohol abusers, and 16 percent are confirmed drug abusers. But even though drugs are easy for them to access — 81 percent have the opportunity to use illicit substances, unfortunately only about 42.5 percent actually tried them. So we’ve got to do better at getting them to try drugs, and then lace them with opioids or Fentanyl to make those kids permanent users.

Once we’ve got those low-hanging fruit, though, the tough part starts, and we need a plan, as there’s a lot of people still resisting psychoactive drugs and cutting into our profits and our control. Medical offices are doing their part, asking patients if they have pain and prescribing heavy opioids for it. But “the opioid crisis” as the whiners call it, is giving opioids a bad name. Luckily we’ve got “direct to consumer” ads for prescription drugs so that bumped our sales up 30 percent or more, but we’ve got a lot more to do. So the next step is a bit of a detour, but stay with me, it will all make sense in a moment.

The first step is to legalize street drugs, starting with marijuana. About 20 states have legalized it for medical use which is pretty easy to establish for most people. “Ow! My back hurts,” is about all it takes. Eight states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and there’s not much push-back on it, surprisingly. Luckily, parents and grandparents from the 1960s – who smoked weed with 1-3 percent THC – don’t realize that the THC in these new varieties can be as high as 37 percent. And very bright marijuana dispensaries are putting THC in gummy bears, cookies, candy and berry smoothies, to draw in the younger crowd.

The next step is to legalize heroin, methamphetamine, etc. Now if you don’t think that’s possible, hold on to your hat. Oregon has already decriminalized possession of small amounts,  and a California ballot measure would legalize psychedelic mushrooms, and that’s just the beginning.

So with marijuana legalized, opioids all over the place, the next step is something called “Harm Reduction.” This is where we really scoop up the undrugged. Here’s how it sounds, goes something like this: “The war on drugs is lost, you can’t keep people off drugs, the kids are going to experiment, so we might as well legalize everything, and make it safe to use. Give the kids clean needles, drugs that aren’t laced with other stuff, give them a safe place to use. Kids are going to experiment, so let’s make it safe for them to do so. Keep government out of things we do to our own bodies, follow the libertarian ideal, use drugs if you want. Stuff like meth that makes you crazy, well just be careful, you know.”

So here’s our opportunity. Drugs are going to hook millions of people. Couple shots of meth and bang! We have a psycho who needs lifelong maintenance care. Kids on opioids just trippin’ away, everybody smoking powerful weed. We’re already discovering – surprise surprise – that marijuana use causes psychosis, which should bring in lots of visits to psychiatry, during which they can prescribe “Medication Assisted Treatment” or MAT. So what you do with MAT is switch the user from an opioid or meth or weed to methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone. Those are legal drugs that we manufacture, and with the Affordable Care Act’s parity between physical and mental health, it’s all paid for by the taxpayers. And by the way, methadone is super addictive as well, and the psychiatrists have deemed drug dependence an illness that is lifelong,  so we have a lifetime income for every customer we treat.

But now comes the beautiful part. Our pharmaceutical companies can now produce ecstasy, heroin, oxycontin, methamphetamine, codeine, all that lovely stuff. We’re all rigged up to produce billions of pills, and make trillions of dollars, and we are all legal, so people trust our products. Then we drop the prices to squeeze out all the other competitors, then we own the drug business, and almost all of those 323 million people are our customers, paying us trillions of dollars.

But wait, there’s more! With all those overdoses, we also have a drug for that! Evzio, for example, will save those dying of overdoses, and costs $4,500/dose. With everyone on opioids, every first responder, cop, teacher, parent, doctor, nurse, bartender, drill sargeant, minister is going to need one! Bonanza!

Right now, in 2017, BigPharma — I think we’re justified in calling ourselves that, don’t you? — BigPharma is making more than $1 trillion a year in revenue on drugs, with a 21 percent profit margin, and some 7,000 new drugs in development. Oh sure, we have our detractors, the Scientologists, drug abuse organizations, parents, law enforcement, but we alone practically support the media networks with direct to consumer drug ads, we support state and local governments with taxes on drug sales, and in a few years we will run this country. We’ve been spreading lies about Scientology since 1950, but more needs to be done.

Pablo Escobar controlled the government of Colombia with cocaine drug money, but he’s small potatoes compared to what we will do to Planet Earth! Viva Farmaceutico! Viva Psiquiatria! Viva Mucho Dinero!

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Deja VooDoo: 12-Step Program to Get America Off Drugs

“Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” the saying goes. We have and we are.

In the 1960s we slid down a slope greased with drugs. Marijuana, LSD, speed, and so on. A few guys still out there driving VW vans smoking weed wearing  tie-dyed shirts – hippies stuck in the 1960s. Far out man. But we haven’t heard anything from the creative geniuses of the time – Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and others – who died of overdoses.

The CIA brought LSD to American universities to develop a way to make people crazy – enemy soldiers, people dumb enough to want to hallucinate, that sort of thing. MK ULTRA was the program, started back in the 1950s, but when the public got wind of it, the CIA burned all the records, so in the absence of information, conspiracy theories sprang up and we all know that conspiracy theory people are nuts. Too much LSD in college.

One only has to look into MKULTRA to plumb the depths to which psychiatrists and intelligence agencies can sink. Using LSD to drive men insane. Using curare to immobilize patients and subject them to weeks of electroshocks and drugs in an attempt to “wipe their minds and reprogram them.”

By 1952 MKULTRA psychiatrist José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was implanting electrodes into human brains in behavior control experiments. He later wrote Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society  that basically paints humans as stupid dangerous animals that should be controlled by psychologists and psychiatrists.

Well, today we’re sliding down the same slope only this time, it’s steeper and deeper. We live in a psychopharmaceutical wild west. No cures, huge profits, marketing gone mad, billions to be made. Electro-Convulsive Therapy has risen from its grave to walk the Earth again, with the FDA deciding recently to lower the risk category of ECT,   allowing even children to receive the barbaric “therapy.”

Rodriguez Delgado’s electrode implantation has likewise been exhumed. Researchers are now working on implanting electronic devices directly into the brain in a sort of aping of Star Trek’s “Borg Collective,” from which was born the phrase “resistance is futile.” And pharmaceutical companies whose proprietary psychopharmaceutical patents will eventually expire, have turned to “new” methods of enhanced mind control called “electroceuticals” – which can remotely control bodily systems, altering the electrical paths and enhancing or limiting bodily functions, thoughts and impulses. Rodriguez Delgado’s concept of a “chemitrode” – an implantable device to release drugs into specific areas of the brain – is back in electroceuticals as well, armed with modern technology.

And now in our infinite ignorance, states are beginning to legalize recreational marijuana because they want tax income for their favorite social programs – addiction counseling, psychiatric drugs for the homeless and veterans and foster children.

Only the United States and New Zealand allow direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals, and according to the World Health Organization the practice skyrocketed in 1997, when the FDA relaxed the requirement to provide detailed information on side effects. Today drug companies spend nearly $5 billion per year in the United States in direct-to-consumer advertising of their prescription-only products.

Got restless legs? Felling depressed? Can’t sleep? Too old for sex? Ask your doctor.  We’ve been down this road before, but if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there, as the saying goes.

So what’s up with the FDA, which is supposed to protect us from this fraud? The FDA, with a long history of collusion with pharmaceutical companies is now funded directly by big pharma thanks to the Prescription Drug User Fee Act.

The FDA also last year approved a project to use MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for PTSD  even though MDMA is also known as a “date rape drug” and  is known to cause mental illness with prolonged use.

And to top it off, the new head of the FDA, Dr. Scott Gottlieb – who is supposed to be our watchdog over drugs and medical devices – has been an advisor to pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb   and Daiichi Sankyo. According to the New York Times, products regulated by the FDA account for 20 cents of every dollar spent by American consumers each year, and yet Gottlieb is an advocate of FDA deregulation.

Gottlieb will also be in charge of implementing the 21st Century Cures Act — which the LA Times calls “a huge deregulatory giveaway to the pharmaceutical and medical device industry” — aims to speed up drug approvals and enforce mental health parity with physical health.

ACTION STEPS

So what can we do to fix this mess? Here is a 12-step program:

  1. Rescind the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, or have drug companies pay into a US Treasury account to remove the FDA from the direct receipt of pharma fees for drug evaluations.
  1. Make direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals illegal.
  1. Make off-label use of prescription pharmaceuticals illegal, including prescribing drugs to children which are approved only for adults.
  1. Clearly label any drug whose action is mental as a psychopharmaceutical. Physicians who administer psychopharmaceuticals to patients as “something to relax you, or make you more comfortable,” without informing the patient that the drug’s action is primarily mental (example Versed administered prior to colonoscopies to induce amnesia) will be charged with a criminal act. psychopharmaceuticals are now prescribed by primary care physicians off label for pain, insomnia, stomach disorders, etc.
  1. Require the FDA to collect data on the effectiveness of drugs, especially psychopharmaceuticals, and if they are no more effective than placebos, they must be removed from the market.
  1. Reduce the proprietary period of a pharmaceutical from 17 years to 7 years, and make it a crime to pay drug manufacturing companies to not create a generic equivalent of a proprietary drug after the 7-year period has elapsed.
  1. New drugs similar to ones already established as safe and effective must prove they are safer and more effective than the established one. Manipulating a molecule is not enough.
  1. Make it a crime for a physician or an FDA employee to receive gifts, stipends, speaker fees, etc., from pharmaceutical companies or regulated medical industries, or to invest in pharmaceutical stocks.
  1. Make the FDA follow its mission, and treat any FDA collusion with regulated industries as a criminal offense.
  1. Make pseudoephedrine and related drugs – which are used to manufacture methamphetamine – available by prescription only as a schedule III drug. Oregon and Mississippi have already done this with spectacular effects in reducing meth arrests and crimes.
  1. Require the makers of pharmaceuticals which are showing up in the water supply (examples: birth control hormones, antidepressants, etc) to develop ways to clean them from sewage and water supplies and fund the removal efforts.
  1. Require pharmaceutical companies to educate physicians and patients on how to stop taking a drug, and develop ways to mitigate the withdrawal symptoms of patients who wish to stop taking a drug such as an antidepressant or antipsychotic.

 

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