“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:
- 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.
- Make direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals illegal.
- Make off-label use of prescription pharmaceuticals illegal, including prescribing drugs to children which are approved only for adults.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Make the FDA follow its mission, and treat any FDA collusion with regulated industries as a criminal offense.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Scientists, psychs, engineers, medicos and others are hacking the brain to control movement. So what’s wrong with that? Let’s start with hacking in the general sense.
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