Category: Drugs

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Dr. Sell – Are You Mad?

Not even mental health experts agree on this. The American Psychiatric Association, which supported the government, argued that mental illness is a physical disease that should be treated like any other. “The brain is an organ just like the liver is an organ and the heart is an organ,” said Dr. Renee Leslie Binder, a psychiatrist who advised the association on its court brief. “If someone has an infection, you don’t tell them to breathe deeply. You give them antibiotics to fight the infection. When someone has a brain disease, the main form of treatment is medication.” New York Times, June 21, 2003

Rather mechanistic view of the brain, don’t you think? All of your behaviours, your personality, your fantasies, your desires, your hopes and dreams– are all the result of chemical processes and physical properties. The brain is not really different from your liver or your heart. If this is true, somewhere in the distant future, we will be able to fix your brain.

How will you know if your brain needs fixing?

You don’t want your brain “fixed”?

Well, that is the issue, isn’t it. Who gets to decide? Who decides if your brain needs to be fixed?

Dr. Charles Thomas Sell was charged with Medicaid fraud five years ago. When he appeared at trial, he cursed, spat, and screamed, according to the New York Times. He was deemed “emotionally disturbed” by the judge and incarcerated in a hospital. Not fit to stand trial, mentally.

The government– the prosecution– asked the courts to allow it to force Dr. Sell to take medications for his illness. They believed that the medications would make him sane. They wanted to help Dr. Sell. After curing him, they could put him on trial and then imprison him for his crimes.

Of course, if Dr. Sell needs medications to make him sane, it raises the possibility that he was not sane when he committed his crimes. Is the prosecution willing to argue that he is sane enough to stand trail because we have cured the insanity that caused him to commit crimes? I somehow doubt it.

Is this a little like the police charging someone with a murder committed with a high-powered rifle. After discovering that he couldn’t shoot straight, they decide to send him out for fire-arms training before they put him on trial? Or an impotent man charged with rape. Can they require him to take Viagra before going on trial?

A similar case was ruled on in Ontario in June 2003. A 47-year-old gentleman named Scott Starson, who is regarded as something as whiz in physics, had asked for the right to refuse to take medication which, he claimed, prevented him from working on his physics. Starson wrote a paper on physics in 1991, with the collaboration of a Stanford physics professor. However, his doctors and his mother felt that he should be ordered to take medication for his mental illness. Starson believes that the medications his doctors want to forcibly inject him with slow down his brain. He says that that would be “worse than death”.

Here’s the clincher. At a hearing, Starson’s doctors admitted that none of the medications had helped him in the past, and that they could not be sure that any of the medications would help him in the future. Not only can we try to force you to let us mess with your mind, but we can even do experiments on it.

The courts in Ontario ruled otherwise. Mr. Starson, it ruled, has a right to think for himself.

What if we had a doctor of society who said that our society was sick? We engage in a mad pursuit of dubious gratifications. We exploit poor people and oppress the powerless. We sell tools of murder and destruction. We destroy the environment.

What we need is for a doctor of society to decide that our society is no longer capable of making rational decisions and, therefore, it should be fixed. All Third World Debt is forgiven, and we will move to a 30-hour work week, with six weeks guaranteed vacation every year. How do you like that? This doctor goes to court and asks a judge to give him the power to fix society.

So who gets to decide?

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“The room had erupted with laughter”

“The class began with a video address by Helge H. Wehmeier, who was then in charge of Bayer’s United States operations. Mr. Wehmeier said that Bayer executives were expected to obey ‘not only the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well.’ And he urged them to call his office if they learned of violations. Mr. Couto recalled how the room had erupted with laughter.” New York Times, April 15, 2003

Bayer negotiated a deal with a Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care organizations in the United States, whereby it falsified the price of Cipro in order to maintain an artificially high price to Medicare services, which, by law, must receive the lowest price on any pharmaceutical product.

The United States Attorney’s Office in Boston caught Bayer doing this because an honest employee named George J. Couto blew the whistle. He received $34 million in reward money. Except that he died of cancer, so his family got the money.

Bayer had to pay $257 million as a settlement. But the part of this story that I like is the laughter in the room when Mr. Wehmeier asked his employees to report any violations of the law to him, personally. The New York Times doesn’t tell us how Wehmeier reacted. Maybe he was astonished at the laughter. Maybe he laughed with them. Maybe he didn’t even know about the laughter because it was a “video address”.

Either way, you have to think about corporate ethics here, and about California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law. There seem to be different rules of behavior in our society, depending on whether your are rich and powerful, like those Bayer executives, or poor and destitute like Leandro Andrade.

That laughter wasn’t really directed at Wehemeier. It was directed at poor little Leandro Andrade— the poor schmuck who got 50 years in prison for stealing $150 worth of video tapes. [Each of the tapes was treated as a separate crime by prosecutors in order to meet the “three strikes” criteria. What if each Cipro tablet had been treated the same way? Would executives from Bayer be sent to prison for 50 years times several million pills?]

Leandro didn’t get a chance to pay a fine instead of going to prison. And he didn’t get the opportunity of having his employer provide him with a top-notch lawyer, and then pay the fine.

And he didn’t get a chance to sit in a room with any of the dozens of other miserable miscreants who are all serving life sentences for petty theft and laugh as a California policeman warned them all not to commit three felonies.

 

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Heartless Merciless Bastards

The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the loss of the right to vote, for life in some states. New York Times, December 28, 2002

In the 1990’s, the Christian government of the United States put its heart into getting “tough on crime”, because they loved everyone. One of the things they did was pass a law that deprives convicted criminals of access to social programs intended to help people trapped in the cycle of poverty and social dysfunction.

Well, who are they intended to help? I don’t know. The U.S. government often acts as if it should be a crime to be poor, period. But let’s think about this. Most robberies are committed by people who need money. Most people who need money are poor. If a poor person commits a crime, steals money, because, after all, they have none, then let’s make sure they are always poor.

Not that welfare amounts to anything that could be interpreted as helping anyone get out of poverty in the first place, of course. But the logic is clear. The way to get rid of poverty is not by sharing the fabulous wealth most of us possess, or by making it easier for the poor to access education and social services, but by making your life on earth as hellish as possible, and one of the things we can do to ensure that is to make sure that you will never get any help again if you steal once.

States can opt out of the lifetime ban on welfare, but only two, New York and Connecticut, have.

The law is the brainchild of former Senator Phil Gramm, now vice chairman of UBS Warbuck, the investment bank. Well, we knew he wasn’t going to join Habitat for Humanity after his little lucrative stay in the Senate. It’s payback time for Mr. Gramm. After years of passing laws that are monumentally beneficial to the rich and to corporate interests, the corporate interests have put him more directly on their payroll. And it’s probably cheaper for them than it was when they had to contribute to his election campaigns instead to keep him in servitude.

In many states, convicted felons are barred from jobs like plumbing, teaching, health care, or security. I’m not making this up. In Pennsylvania, theft of two library books is sufficient to ban you for life from working in a nursing home. A man who was convicted of possession of marijuana (and received probation) when he was 18 recently discovered that, after 30 years of working in the health care field, he could not get a new job in the same field because of that previous conviction.

This is because our leaders love Jesus.

“The consequences affect millions of Americans. Thirteen million felons who are in prison or have done their time live in the United States, according to an estimate by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. That is almost 7 percent of the adult population.”

[2011-03: that figure is now 10%]

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The Decline of Violent Crime

In 1963, the City of New York had 25,500 police officers, and a murder rate of less than 600 a year. In the mid 1980s, the murder rate about 2,200 a year. Today, for the first time in almost 40 years, the murder rate will be below 600. The number of police officers: 38,000. The number of 911 calls on an average day: 1,000. What are the other 37,000 officers doing? I don’t know.

Nobody seems to know what’s going on. Why is there a huge decline in the murder rate? Did people become good? Have we executed enough criminals now that we are finally safe? Has all that harsh law and order finally started to have a beneficial effect?  Abortions?

The murder rate increased in connection with the widespread distribution of drugs. But drugs don’t cause crime. They don’t. Drugs cause people to waste their lives, and they cause people to do stupid things, and they are addictive, but there is no particular reason why someone using drugs would be more criminal-minded than, say, the CEO of Enron corporation.

But when drugs are illegal, and the cost to an addict increases to a preposterous amount, and the drug trade is hugely profitable because of the high prices caused by interdiction, crime will increase because of the illegality of drugs.

The truth is that drugs are not illegal in America. They are practically obligatory. Prozac, Lithium, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil– you name it, you need it. The difference is that some drugs are not patented. Like marijuana, hashish, opium, and cocaine. So drug companies cannot profit from them by providing exclusive access to them. So they must be illegal.

I’ve already made my arguments for legalizing drugs. What I’m concerned with here is that New York’s murder rate is down to about the lowest number it’s been in 40 years. So if you believe that the world is rapidly heading to hell in a hand basket, and that our morally bankrupt nation is sliding into a hellhole of perdition and depravity, you’ll have to explain why it doesn’t show up in the murder rate.

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More Drugs

More lobbyists than congressmen, 625 with a budget of $197 million– yes, the largest.

  • Eli Lilly
  • Pfizer
  • Merck, Raymond V. Gilmartin, chief exec.
  • Bayer
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • Bristol-Myers, Peter R. Dolan, chief exec.
  • G. D. Searle (Donald Rumsfeld is former chief executive).
  • Mitchell Daniels, Bush’s budget director, is a former executive with Eli Lilly.

Top executives have met with Bush several times. To respond to what he thinks the nation needs? Or tell him what they would like him to do?

On Wednesday, October 31, they met with Tom Ridge, Bush’s appointed director of homeland security, for 90 minutes. They offered a partnership with America. Ridge gratefully accepted.

Executives from generic (cheap) drug companies have been conspicuously absent from these meetings.

Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, is a lobbyist for Bristol-Myers Squibb.

70% of their donations went to Republicans last year, $26 million. Republicans and Democrats alike assure us that the drug industry willingly spends $26 million dollars on an election without the slights expectation of any kind of favorable treatment.

Americans spent $100 billion– yes BILLION — on drugs last year, 2x as much as 1990. Drugs were supposed to reduce the cost of medicine because they provided more cost efficient treatment strategies.

All of our cost-reducing measures should be so efficient!

Bayer’s total pharmaceutical sales: $5.8 billion. Cipro, the Anthrax treatment, accounts for $1.6 billion of that. The normal profit margin on Cipro tablets: 95%. They cut it down to 65% to mollify congress and the president.

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Haggard Merle Haggard

I just saw some kind of tribute to Merle Haggard. Hey, let me get on the bandwagon.

Merle Haggard spent some time in prison before he was 20, for petty theft, passing bad checks, and so on.  Haggard married Fiona something, some time in the late fifties. I think she was about 15 at the time. He wasn’t very nice to Fiona.

Merle had an affair with Buck Owen’s wife. Just one more little hypocrisy in the heartland of America: country singers that claim to represent “traditional values” like manliness, family, patriotism, marital fidelity,  but actually behave pretty well as badly as anyone else.

Merle Haggard wrote and sang “Okie From Muskogee”, which, besides providing comfort and joy to rednecks like George Wallace, helped him wrangle a pardon from California Governor Ronald Reagan– yes, he of the “tough on crime” reputation. And an invitation to play at Pat’s birthday at the White House.

Did Haggard, espousing bedrock American values, serve in the military?

Have you heard “Okie From Muskogee”? It has lines like:

We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street…
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy…
… and I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

No, of course he never served in the military. He’s a Republican. We send other people to die for the cause and then lead the parades, all misty-eyed and such. It’s a bit weird how predictable it all is — Republicans and conservatives extolling the enduring virtues of patriotism and courage and duty and you can’t find a damn one of them that actually served. All right– maybe one. John McCain. [added 2011-03-05]

Merle split from Bonnie Owens in 1975. He had a string of affairs. He did drugs and drank to excess. He had an affair with Liona Williams– a backup singer. But he finally found understanding and encouragement in Theresa Lane, a woman 25 years younger than him.

He neglected his own children, except maybe the ones by Theresa Lane. Now that he’s a little older and less driven, I guess he finally has a little time to spend with the kids.

In the meantime, he squandered and gambled away all of his money and went bankrupt.

What’s really great is seeing Merle Haggard, long hair and beard, standing in front of a group of well-known country musicians, long hair and beards, accepting induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, long hair and beards. Does he still sing “and we don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy…”? Does he say, “nothing personal” when he goes into “Okie”? Does he even sing it anymore? Yes, he does, looking a little sheepish as he warbles those bedrock American values. It’s all about family and true love and being a man and tradition and patriotism. For everyone else, I guess.

Clint Black was among those paying tribute. Rightly so. He has that same kind of non-descript blandness to his voice that is so characteristic of Haggard’s music. There’s really not much to it. Simple, as if simplicity without charm was a virtue.

He’s like someone down the street, that you know, and with whom, Lord knows, you might one day have an affair.

If not Haggard…

Haggard has something of a reputation for a song-writer. Now, I know there are some good country song-writers out there, but the writer of:

They both robbed and killed until both of them died
So goes the Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.

was not a great songwriter.

Consider instead John Prine. Like Haggard, he’s old and weathered-looking. Unlike Haggard, he’s written about fifteen really great songs. John Prine had more great songs in his little finger than Merle Haggard had in his entire body.

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A Victory in the War of Drugs

Russell Eugene Weston Jr., 44 years old, walked into the Capitol Building in Washington DC on July 24th, 1998, in order to save the world from cannibals, and to retrieve top secret information from a satellite system that was capable of time-travel. I’m not sure why he thought the government would be of any use to him, but he did, and when the government didn’t listen he shot and killed two guards.

He is imprisoned in Butner, North Carolina, in solitary, because, after all, he is mad. In what used to be the civilized world, he would be in some kind of treatment program where smart people with degrees in psychology would be trying to help him recover his senses. But this is America of the 21st century and bloodlust over-rules compassion so the government wants very badly to put him on trial for murder and sentence him to death.

The trouble is, of course, that Mr. Weston appears to be insane. It is a well-established facet of the modern justice system that a person who is not responsible for his actions cannot be convicted of crimes committed while he was not responsible for his actions, ie., in possession of his faculties, his reason, his ability to discern right from wrong.

A small obstacle to be sure. In a new, significant skirmish in the real drug war– the war waged by pharmaceuticals to get everybody onto drugs– a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit ordered him to be medicated!

Mr. Weston’s lawyer– a public defender (and we all know how awesome public defenders are)– is considering an appeal. Of course, appeals ultimately end up in the hands of those robed dildos of Partisan Politics, the Supremes.

Well, what is wrong with medicating this guy so he can be ruled sane so he can be tried for murders committed while he was insane?  And then executed?   We need to provide a nice deterrent to all those crazy UFO-believers out there with guns.

Apart from the obvious– that just because medications can make him appear to be sane doesn’t mean he was sane at the time of the murders– there is the absurd circumstance of the government drugging people into certain specified conditions (guided by the high priests of mental sanitation, psychiatrists and psychologists) in order to obtain particular results from the justice system.

I know– it’s hard to wrap your mind around this issue, especially if it’s medicated. But break it down. The drugs in question are those very powerful psychotropic drugs the mission of which is to alter a person’s personality or emotions.

Is this allowed by the constitution? The very question is insane– of course not. The idea that a constitution that protects the right of privacy and freedom of speech and presumes innocence until proof of guilt is established and  validated by a duly constituted jury or judge, would permit any government body to forcibly alter a person’s mind with powerful psychotropic drugs— it’s absolutely outrageous.

But that’s not even the most objectionable part of it all. Of what use is this procedure to the prosecution? The man was probably insane when he shot the two guards. The prosecution wishes to argue that he was not insane. They are allowed to specify how his mind should be altered in order to present him as evidence in support of their view????

The precedent is shattering. With the pharmaceutical companies already revving up the corporate cheer-leaders, every prosecutor in the country will now consider the option of obtaining a court order to force prescribed personality alterations of defendants in criminal actions.

You think I’m getting carried away? What if I had told you 50 years ago that we were headed towards the kind of society in which people who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives in any form would go to their doctors and readily obtain prescriptions for powerful mood-altering substances that would help them cope with their terrible little lives?

You would have thought I was insane.

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The Best Doctor

Whenever I hear someone talking about some surgery or cancer treatment or whatever that they had, they always assure me that the doctor who did the work was “the very best” there is at that specialty. Think about this: how often will someone tell you that the doctor they saw was “the very worst”? Never, right? But if someone is the “very best” that means that someone else out there, practicing medicine and making a living at it, is the “very worst”.

A Massachusetts study from 1996 found that 1/3 of terminal cancer patients received useless chemotherapy treatments in the last six months of their lives.

They were given a useless treatment with terrible side-effects by a doctor who undoubtedly was “the best there is”.

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Harold Shipman

In Great Britain, if you took a sampling of 1000 women between the ages of 65 and 74 who see a doctor regularly, you would normally find a death rate of 4.5 per year.

Of 1000 patients of Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman, the death rate was 45 per year. He began his own practice in Hyde in 1992. He was caught this year.

Uh yes… the numbers are not the result of chance or coincidence. Dr. Shipman has been injecting some of his patients with a fatal dose of diamorphine. He seems to have murdered 300 this way. Yes, does seem like it took a little while for anyone to notice.

Sometimes he would go into a patient’s file and alter significant facts, in order to establish the “illness” of which the patient died at his hands. No one noticed because the families of deceased patients do not get access to the deceased’s medical records.

A few people over the years became suspicious. The police were even called. But when the police went to the General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Great Britain, they told them that unless an official complaint was received they could do nothing.

Since Dr. Shipman never summoned an ambulance or called for a coroner after any of the suspicious deaths, there were no records except his own, and therefore, no details about the exact circumstances of death, except those which he provided.

The local health authority investigated and found nothing suspicious. Again, it appears that they relied on Dr. Shipman’s records to verify Dr. Shipman’s performance. There is no system in place to monitor the performance of doctors. Think about that. There is no system in place to monitor the performance of doctors. In other words, a doctor could kill 300 patients and no one would be the wiser. Well, yes. That’s what happened.

The first public reports of the investigation of Dr. Shipman were met with outrage by the citizens of Hyde who felt that a good doctor was being tarred with a broad brushstroke. Obviously, the good citizens of Hyde hadn’t noticed anything odd either. Here was a doctor who murdered patients with great frequency. The patient’s families were notified of the death. The bodies were cremated or buried. Nobody kept score.

The police finally seized Dr. Shipman’s medical records. Ah, but they didn’t obtain the proper paperwork beforehand and had to return them. Imagine the police seizing a knife or a gun from a suspected murderer, and then being ordered to return it to the suspect because they hadn’t said “may I”? To get around this little technicality, the police charged him with homicide. Then they were permitted to investigate.

Altogether, as I said, Dr. Shipman may have killed more than 300 women.

Sometimes he did the killing in his office and saw several more patients before reporting the death.

Now this may sound like a bit of stretch, but ask yourself this, in connection with Dr. Shipman’s offenses: how do you know that your doctor is doing a good job? I’m serious. I mean, you know that your doctor is not likely to inject fatal quantities of diamorphine into your veins, but if a doctor in a developed country can get away with doing this to hundreds of women over a period of ten years, how much less likely is it that your own doctor can get away with being completely incompetent?

In other words, who is keeping score?

You can read the sports pages every day to find out if Delgado is earning his millions for the Blue Jays. How many home runs did he hit? What’s his batting average? Is he making a lot of errors over there at first base?

Why don’t we have the same thing for doctors? It doesn’t have to be ridiculously detailed. Just a simple table of visits, total number of operations, drugs prescribed, x-rays, cures, improvements, and… deaths.

There were signs of trouble with Dr. Shipman back in 1976 when he was convicted of stealing drugs and issuing fake prescriptions. But he was able to pay a modest little fine and move on. This was his minor league record. Mediocre. Not expected to make the big leagues.

But he worked at it and re-established himself and went on to establish a new record: 300 murders. That’s about 287 more than Klebold and Harris at Columbine. How many Nightlines do you think they’ll devote to this story? How many Newsweek Covers?

How many people are going to throw up their hands and scream, “What’s happening to our society! We should have zero-tolerance for deaths at the hands of doctors!”

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Selling the New Drug

How do the drug companies persuade doctors to prescribe their drugs? Well one company, Purdue, held over 7,000 seminars last year to “inform” doctors about “pain management”, which, of course, consists of prescribing its particularly powerful drug called “Oxycontin”. Why do the doctors go to these seminars? How about free weekend travel and hotel accommodations, to Florida and other lovely locales? (In December, United States attorneys in Maine, persuaded Purdue to stop paying for the doctor’s travel expenses to these seminars and it agreed do so.)

A spokesperson for Eli Lilly said that the company asked women and physicians about a treatment for PMDD and they told Eli Lilly that they wanted a drug with it’s own identity for this special problem. I’ll bet the same focus group told them they wanted to squander $100 a month on medicines that treat imaginary illnesses.

David Rubinow, Clinical Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, says “there is a very high degree of false positive self-assessments– women assume they are suffering from PMS or PMDD when, in fact, they are not.” If you were an investor, would you bet on that dynamic? I would.

Interesting side-effect: if Eli Lilly prevails– you can bet they are using all their influence to get “studies” that show that PMDD really exists– we will soon see court cases in which a woman claims that she shop-lifted or drove too fast or neglected a child, because of PMDD. The court will then hear that Americans spend more than $1 billion a year on treatment for this “disease”, even if it isn’t listed as one in the DSM, and will be duly impressed and find the woman not-guilty, or award somebody a hundred million dollars in damages or whatever. Then Eli Lilly will point to the court cases and say, “see– even our courts recognize that PMDD exists!” Thus you have self-fulfilling prophecy.