A hundred years ago, traveling shows peddled patent medicine, sometimes one step ahead of the authorities. Ingredients included opium, alcohol, laudanum, radium and other illicit substances. Tapeworm larvae were sometimes suspended in weight-reduction remedies.
By the time the authorities closed in, the wagon, the salesman and his wares were gone, leaving the purchaser or the local doctor to deal with the side effects of the medication: addiction, parasite infestation, cancer or worse. Today, we may look at such abuses as a long-gone product of unbridled greed and horrific ignorance that could not exist in our highly connected and well-educated society of today.
However, indications point to a modern-day version of yesteryear’s patent medicine traveling show.
We live in a psychopharmaceutical wild west of psychiatry and its pharmaceutical sidekick. No cures, huge profits, marketing gone mad, billions to be made. Electro-Convulsive Therapy has risen from its grave to walk the Earth again.
BigPharma’s game is money. It needs trillion-dollar revenues to overcome generic drug competition, expiring patents, the gradually rising specter of drug side effects such as mass murder, and basically, the fact that popular drugs like antidepressants don’t work, or work only because of “the placebo effect.”
Psychiatry, on the other hand, has long lusted for power and control and has long been a handy political tool for despots and tyrants, since it is allowed to invalidate and incarcerate individuals outside normal legal protections. The Soviets, Chinese, North Koreans, and others put political dissidents into mental institutions where they may be locked up, drugged, electroshocked and removed from the normal course of legal protection. After all, who in their right mind would disagree with some benevolent “Dear Leader” but the insane?
In 2008, China declared Internet addiction a clinical disorder, and some 6,000 “Internet addicts” mostly children, were electroshocked and drugged in one Chinese “deprogramming” facility.
Timothy Leary told us to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” but later said that LSD got into the public arena and was abused. Poor guy, he had it all figured out that it would only be used by PhDs and above, and then the unwashed masses got hold of it and used it to hallucinate. The CIA used it to drive soldiers crazy and to suicide, and stupid people who grew up watching Superman thought they could fly off tall buildings wearing meat bodies. So what can be done about it?
