Category: Drugs

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Saraphim, Sarafem

Lying, scheming, scoundrels!

Eli Lilly is the drug company that makes “Prozac”. Prozac, used to treat depression, is patented, which means Eli Lilly can charge a fortune for each prescription because nobody else can make or sell it. Unfortunately– hold the tears– the patent on Prozac expires in August of 2001.

Hold the tears.

Prozac is one of those wonder drugs that doctors love to prescribe to people who come in and say they are tired and depressed and sad and unhappy and tired and don’t enjoy their lives and are miserable and unhappy and tired and so on and so on and since the doctor doesn’t have the time, ability, or inclination to make the person’s life any better– to find them better jobs or spouses or children or neighborhoods or families– he prescribes a happy pill, which alters the basic chemical balance in the brain– well, it makes you happy. Like pot, except legal. And about $100 a month, which, frankly, makes pot look like value for the dollar.

But– hold the tears– soon anybody will be able to make a drug called “Prozac” and will be able to sell it for less than Eli Lilly. Lilly, one of the most profitable corporations on the face of the earth, will have to actually begin charging something close to what it actually costs to make the drug, plus a little profit.

Prozac earns Lilly about $2 billion a year. I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. The Washington Post said it: $2 billion! A year! What’s a greedy corporation to do, especially after all it’s contributions to election campaigns have failed to save it’s patent!

Well, by golly, never underestimate the imagination and creativity of the drug dealers. The “legit” drug dealers, I mean. Eli Lilly has just introduced a new drug– Sarafem– and a massive advertising campaign to designed to convince you that you’re sick even if you aint. And low and behold– holy pharmaceuticals, Batman!– Sarafem, in cute little pastel colours, is nothing other than– hold those tears!– Prozac, relabeled and packaged!

Sarafem is for women suffering from PMDD. You don’t know what PMDD is? You don’t?! Shocking. How could you not be aware of an illness that is so absolutely scientifically proven that is has an official acronym? Read the magazines! Watch television! See your doctor! Ask her if you might be suffering from PMDD.

PMDD is “PreMenstrual Dysphoric Disorder”. That’s right. Phew. First of all, breathe a sigh of relief if you are a man. Since you aren’t as likely to stuff yourself full of chemicals in the first place, you can relish another opportunity to save yourself some money, because “Sarafem” costs as much as the old patented Prozac– about $100 a month. It is reported that women take Sarafem every day.

Every day! I find that stunning. Prozac is not a little pep pill or aspirin. It is a powerful psychotropic drug. And doctors and the pharmaceutical industry just blithely go about trying to persuade as many normal young women as possible to tamper with their brains.

Well, by golly, why does it cost so much? I’m glad you asked. If Prozac is no longer a patent medicine after August 2001 and anybody can make it….!

Ah– the loopholes! You see if an existing drug can find a new application, the patent on the new application of the existing drug can continue, in this case, until 2007! So while anybody can now make and market “Prozac”, only Eli Lilly can make and market Sarafem.

Yahoo! Now all we need to do is find an illness!

Now how do you find an illness? Well, in the United States, the APA (American Psychiatric Association) sort of officially defines mental illnesses. It puts out this huge book called the “DSM” which is like the Bible of mental health. You might remember a few years ago that the DSM has decided that most every energetic two-year-old is afflicted with a mental illness. Most parents have the good sense to know that their child is merely a two-year-old. But, hey, where’s the profit in that? And do “most” parents really know this? The statistics on the use of Ritalin do not encourage this assumption.

The importance of the DSM is that insurance companies use it to determine whether or not they will pay for treatments. If it aint listed, it aint covered. Of course, it is then in the interests of the health industry to ensure that almost everything is listed, so that therapists, doctors, and pharmacists can be paid.

In other words, what the DSM has actually become is a shopping catalogue of real and imagined complexes.

Anyway, we have women with periods. Periods, by all accounts, are uncomfortable and annoying. In short, they sometimes make women feel bad. Now, most people accept that PMS exists– a kind of moody irritable stage of the monthly cycle just before the period– and that drugs that alleviate the feelings of bloatedness and… whatever.. make some sense. Some.

But even the DSM doesn’t believe that PMDD really exists. It is listed in the appendix as a condition that is “under evaluation”. That doesn’t stop Eli Lilly from running advertisements that suggest that that lousy feeling you have while pushing a heavy shopping cart in an ugly grocery store with three kids screaming at you for candy can actually be blamed on an official, registered, scientifically validated “disorder”. See your doctor. Women do. They see the ad, they see their doctors, their doctors prescribe, Eli Lilly gets rich.

How can they get away with this? Well, the good old Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. has decided that Lilly’s opinion matters more than the DSM’s. It has approved Lilly marketing the drug for a non-existent disorder.

What we have here is something that, like Hyper Attention Deficit Disorder or Hyper Disorder Attention Deficit or whatever it’s called, defines normal but unpleasant conditions as a “disorder”. That is the dream disease for the drug companies because everyone has it. We have a limitless number of potential customers. All we need to do is convince them that they’re sick. And Sarafem advertises itself as the only official remedy for PMDD.

What we need are ads that show the same external conditions that the Eli Lilly ads show– tired women, ugly stores, muzak, incoherent labels, over-priced candy, noise, dust, rude clerks– with a text that runs: “Does your life stink? Try changing your life.” One thing you could do is join an organization that fights companies like Eli Lilly.

And hold the tears.

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Standard of Living

So you have this athlete.

He’s born with a gift: he can hit baseballs really, really well, and he can run and jump and catch. And when he gets to be about 18, he is descended upon by agents, lawyers, scouts, recruiters, and everyone imaginable– who might want one of the golden eggs.

And he signs a contract and buys his mother a Buick and takes his friends out to party does some drugs and hires a couple of body guards. And the babes flow like ripened orchids spraying down a verdant valley…

Who knows why he chose Lisa. He saw her at a Lakers’ game. They met. They did who knows what. Somehow she, alone of all the babes, persuaded him to make a commitment, though anyone who knows anything about professional athletes and money and waste can hardly conceive of the phrase in such a context. But that’s what they say, made a commitment.

They marry. Where does she come from? Nowhere, really. She’s not an athlete. She’s not rich. She’s not the daughter of the head of a multi-billion dollar corporation. She is Lisa Strawberry and that’s enough, thank you.

And we know about Darryl. In one of the Simpsons’ most prescient episodes, Mr. Burns hires bunch of professional ball players to be ringers on the plant team so he can beat a hated rival. As “Darryl Strawberry” stands in the outfield, the crowd, as they did in real life, mockingly chants “Dar—-ryl, Dar—ryl”. Bart joins in. Lisa says, Bart, it’s not nice to make fun of a ball-player and Bart replies that professional athletes are used to it, it’s no big deal. And then a close-up of Darryl Strawberry’s face as a big, fat tear drops from his eye.

From the news:

To back up her petition of $50,000 per month in spousal support, which was granted, Lisa filed papers with the Superior Court of California saying that she had been spending $20,000 a month for clothes, $5,000 a month for shoes and an average of $7,000 for each purchase of jewelry, “which I have been free to indulge myself in as desired.”

“How am I the culprit?” she asks at breakfast. “They wanted to know what was my standard of living. And that’s what it was.”

Well, if she doesn’t get it, we know where it’s going to go instead. Strawberry was arrested last year for trying to buy drugs and propositioning an undercover police officer. Is Lisa’s $20,000 a month on clothes different, really? He’s addicted to cocaine, she’s addicted to clothes. He’s a fool and she’s an idiot. They deserve each other.

The judge should order them to remain married for as long as they both are fools.

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The West Wing

Just about the only television show I watch semi-regularly nowadays is “West Wing”. And The Simpsons. But let’s stay with “West Wing” for a minute.

I have to note here though that the only reason I don’t watch very much television is not because most television is crap, though it is. The fact is that there is a lot of good shows on television too. The trouble is that there are way too many commercials. Did you know that the Dick Van Dyke Show, in the early 1960’s, was about 28 minutes long? The average sitcom today is about 20 minutes. Where did the other 8 minutes go? You need to ask?

In tonight’s episode of West Wing, the President had to make some fateful decisions about possible military action to rescue hostages in Columbia. The story, which parallels reality rather closely, develops after the government gives Columbia $15 billion to fight the drug trade. After a remarkable speech about the utter futility of the drug war, the waste of money, the 80% of the U.S. prison population that consists of drug users, and so on, the dialogue takes a turn on Viet Nam. One of the President’s top advisors warns that he should not repeat the mistake of Viet Nam, which was… what? What was the mistake? The advisor said the mistake was that the U.S. entered the war on the side of a corrupt and unpopular government, and that it did not have clear objectives, and did not have a clear exit strategy. That was the mistake of the Viet Nam War.

The West Wing is one of the few television shows that really is unabashedly liberal. Don’t believe for one minute all that nonsense from Conservative commentators on the so-called “liberal” media– it simply aint true. West Wing is the exception, not the rule.

But the advisor’s explanation about why the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam buys into a conservative revisionist position that is itself a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the idea of U.S. subterfuge of foreign governments for its own self-interest.

The Viet Nam War began because the U.S. and France refused to accept the results of an election in 1956 which produced a socialist government of a united Viet Nam. With both French and American encouragement, a group of rebels seized power in the South and created a pro-capitalist regime. When the new regime proved unpopular– after all, the people elected the socialists– the U.S. was forced to step in to support the government, and fight a proxy war against the North Viet Namese government, which, reasonably, was determined to reunite the country.

Where did France go? Those silly Frenchmen! They decided that backing a self-seeking, corrupt, illegitimate government against the popular wishes of its own people was a losing proposition! The fools!

The North did not remain democratic, really, but we don’t know what would have happened if the South had not seceded and the U.S. had not involved itself. It doesn’t really matter– the fact is that the U.S. interfered in the domestic policies of a sovereign state and paid the price for it. That’s why they lost Viet Nam. It had nothing to do with unclear objectives. The objective was, in fact very clear: the maintenance of a pro-American proxy state in the region at whatever cost to civil rights and democracy. The problem was not that the Americans did not have an exit strategy: given the objectives, there was no need for an exit at all. And the problem was not that the government of South Viet Nam was unpopular and corrupt: that was at least partly a consequence of U.S. policy, not an impediment to it. Had the U.S. stayed out, chances are quite good that that corrupt government could never have sustained it’s position.

The writers and producers of “West Wing” should know better.

But it’s a great show. It’s subtle, sophisticated, topical, and relevant. That’s rare in television. What’s even more rare is the overt political nature of the program: it is quite frankly Democrat in perspective. The Democrats should be proud.

The Republicans, if they were really smart, would be working on their own television drama by now. On the other hand, they already have a dozen: Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and just about every other cop show on television. They almost all show that respect for civil rights and the assumption of innocence is an impediment to justice and fairness. They almost all propagandize for unlimited police powers. They almost all feed into the right wing paranoia that has led to the creation of America’s idiotic drug and gun laws.

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Drug War Sponsors

The United States is going to give the government of Columbia $1.5 billion of aid in their war against drugs.

Now, on the surface, this might sound to you like a bad idea. You don’t think some of Columbia’s military and political leaders might get the idea that the more drugs Columbia supplies to the United States, the more money they are going to get for new equipment, training, and fringe benefits, do you? Or do you think that their reputation for honesty, integrity, and diligence is such that after a few years of aid, they will announce to the world that the program has been a success and therefore no more American money is needed?

It is pretty well documented that the small successes early on in the war against drugs contributed to the over-all failure of the same war. When the FBI and other government agencies cracked down on the most visible agents of drug trafficking in the early 1980’s, the prices of many of these drugs went soaring, which caused a huge number of new sellers to appear. Furthermore, the really smart dealers went deeper underground to avoid detection and became ever more entrenched and sophisticated, and almost impossible to stamp out. The result is that drugs are now far more profitable and widely available than ever before.

Isn’t that kind of shocking? If a private business set out to accomplish something that cost hundreds of billions of dollars over more than twenty years, it would probably have the good sense to sit down at some point and try to answer the question of whether it was moving closer or farther from it’s goal. If it found that, after twenty years, it was farther away from its goal than ever before, I tend to think they would stop wasting their money and come up with a new plan.

But this is a government plan of course. Ironically, the very people who most decry government waste in other areas of the economy– conservatives and Republicans– are the most enthusiastic about spending a few hundred billion more on the same self-defeating program.

And now they are pouring $1.5 billion into a corrupt Columbian government to ensure that even worse results can be obtained. You see, when the Columbian army is not busy stamping out drug dealers, or fighting an entrenched guerrilla movement, it tends to spend a lot of time and effort assassinating human rights activists and peasants.

Nice to know that now they will be able to violate human rights with state of the art equipment.

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The Diagnosis

It is so important to give it a label.

You feel tired. You are bored. You are frustrated. Maybe you’re also not very bright or ambitious. You don’t want to tell people you are tired and bored and frustrated and not very ambitious, because that would make it sound like it’s your own fault. So, instead, you have chronic fatigue syndrome.

Maybe your two-year-old is really active. He climbs up everything. He’s loud and noisy and eager and excitable. You find this annoying. But you can’t tell anyone that you find your own kid annoying or that you are too impatient to be a good parent, so, instead, you say that he has attention deficit disorder and pop some drugs into him to slow him down.  Sure, it takes away some of his energy and curiosity, but, hey, you have to get your sleep.

The diagnosis, in our society, is essential. We need that label. We need an identifier. We have to generate public belief in and enthusiasm for conditions that might be nebulous, vague, or invisible.

Why?

Well, almost every time you hear the diagnostic label being propounded, it’s by someone who makes his or her living treating it. This is why the bible of psychotherapy, the DSM III or IV or V or whatever it’s at now, always gets bigger and bigger. It never shrinks. They almost never remove “syndromes” from it. (It caused a bit of nudging and winking when they did finally remove homosexuality from their list of morbidities not all that long ago.)

And that’s why pharmaceutical companies are determined to get your kid into their slimy clutches. They are promoting the idea that a four-year-old who wont go to bed nicely when asked has some kind of mental disorder and needs to be drugged. Once your kid is used to those colorful little pills twelve times a day, they know he’ll never, ever again feel that he can handle life without some kind of narcotic assistance.  His “baseline” is obliterated.  Whatever he feels from now on will be partly due to the drugs and partly due to withdrawal from the drugs.  The perfecta of pharmaceutical self-sufficiency.

The magic of the diagnosis is clear. Some people will deny that feeling tired or frustrated or depressed is an illness. Some people might think its just part of life. You put up with it. You endure it, and get on with the things you have to do.

But it’s easy to convince people otherwise. If you have the proper label for something, people will assume that adequate research and scientific analysis has determined that this condition really exists. We trust doctors. They’ll assume that a doctor made the diagnosis, and everyone knows how smart doctors are. They’ll assume that everyone thinks it is a real condition because it has become part of the language. It becomes shorthand, to a lot of people, for complexities that are too hard to explain quickly.

When I was a lot younger, if I heard someone say something like, “he has attention deficit disorder”, I would just assume that there was such a thing as “attention deficit disorder”, and therefore we better do something about it. Now I’m a lot more skeptical, but I can remember how easy it was to accept sophisticated-sounding terms like that as if they referred to clear, objective realities.

When you look at the “symptoms” of chronic fatigue syndrome, you realize how utterly subjective and arbitrary labels can be. Tiredness. Depression. Loss of appetite. Headaches. Difficult to get up in the morning. And so on. Sounds like just about anyone’s rotten little life. Label it, and we can blame someone or something else. Label it, and we can talk multi-million dollar lawsuits. Label it and we can make a drug that fixes it. Then we are not “doing drugs”. We are doing “therapy”. We are taking the “wonder drugs”, Lithium and Prozac and Paxil, and whatever. It’s okay– we have to take these drugs: we have a condition.

The drugs, of course, don’t really fix anything. They give you a sustained high. It is one of the great myths of our society that drugs like Lithium and Prozac actually treat real conditions. That is utter nonsense. They simply make you feel good. But we have to believe in the myth, or else we would have to admit that we’re really not much better than your average drug addict or alcoholic.

Well, we’re not.

I heard some parents on the radio recently (the CBC) talking about their “hyper-active” child. The parents of this child were at their wits end. They didn’t know what to do. They went to the doctor. He prescribed Ritalin. They tried it. It worked! Hallelujah. However, their child just didn’t seem to be herself anymore. She lost her sense of insatiable curiosity. She lost her spark, her zest for life. They took her off Ritalin and tried different parenting techniques instead. From the details the father gave on the air, it was clear that he and his wife simply got better at parenting. They learned to anticipate when problems might occur. They planned ahead for family outings. They became more flexible and adaptable. Amazingly, the problems seemed to go away.

Was their child ever really “hyper-active”? If you read the definition of hyper-activity from the DSM, it is an amazingly accurate description of just about any two-year-old.

Beware of labels.

Update 2022-04-26

And I will concede that this will not a popular post.  I am regularly astounded at how many people I know are taking psychotropic drugs, and obviously I am very skeptical of their use.  I am wary of hurting people’s feelings.  But there is good reason to voice my dissent no matter how small a minority I represent.  We in danger, as a society, of building a world in which we continually anesthetize ourselves against our deepest anxieties.  We have good reason to be anxious: we are melting the ice caps.  We are promoting intolerance and bigotry.  We are more divided than ever before.  We should be anxious and the worst solution is to address our anxiety with palliatives.

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Bloodletting

If you were really sick, do you think it would help if someone cut open one of your veins and drained about a quart of blood out of you?

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This was the preferred remedy of the medical establishment for at least 300 years. According to my history books, even the ancient Greeks may have practised it. They thought that sickness was caused by some kind of poison that got into your blood. The solution was to drain some of the blood out, so that new poison-free blood could take its place and dilute the effects of the poisons.

Now, you may wonder, how could so many people have been so stupid for so long? This remedy persisted well into the 19th century, in spite of absolutely no scientific proof that worked.

Now, I didn’t say there was no “proof” of any kind, that it worked. They did have proof. And it makes for an interesting object lesson in the meaning of “proof”.

This was the proof. Let’s say fifty people got seriously sick, from some kind of virus. Doctor Bloodpan comes to visit his fifty patients, one by one. If it’s a serious virus, given the circumstances of life in the 18th century, it wasn’t unlikely that more than a few of these fifty were going to die. And people knew that. They were petrified of all diseases in a way that people nowadays are petrified of AIDS.

So Doctor Bloodpan goes around to all his patients and drains a quart of blood from each and tells the family that it’s very serious and they must all pray. The family knows that a miracle is about as likely as a cure, so they do, fervently.

Well, Doctor Bloodpan is an incompetent idiot, so half his patients die. Does he go around announcing to all his patients that he is an incompetent idiot? No, of course not. He goes around and announces that he is a brilliant success: he has saved 25 lives! God be praised! And so he is.

Now, some skeptic comes along and says, “hey, what kind of idiot is this Doctor Bloodpan? If he would have just left most of these people alone, at least forty would have lived instead of just twenty-five.” And the families of the survivors go, “What, are you nuts? Doctor Bloodpan is a genius! He saved my husband!” And the families of the dead go, “Well, life is tough.”

Do you think it would be hard, under the circumstances, to convince people that Dr. Bloodpan is a hero? I don’t think so. Human nature is funny. When someone dies, we instinctively think we might have been responsible. We don’t often want to even raise the question, let alone make a public issue out of it. Would George Twentykids have lived if Dr. Bloodpan hadn’t drained the life out of him? Mrs. Twentykids, who screamed at him and called him a worthless fool on the very day he became ill, says, “oh no. It was God’s will.”

We think we’re so much smarter today. Well, consider this:

Many people, even today, are reluctant to call a doctor, probably for good reason. So when a person gets a virus, he waits and waits before seeking help. Inside his body, the virus is strongest in the first few days. Soon, his body’s built-in defenses take over and anti-bodies form, attacking the virus. This is about the time the person feels worst, so he makes an appointment to see the doctor. The appointment is in a day or two. By the time he goes to the doctor, he is already getting better. Does the doctor say, “Hey, you’re already getting better. Go home and have a nice nap.”? Oh no. The doctor, thinking back fondly upon that excursion to the Bahamas paid for by some big pharmaceutical company, happily prescribes some drugs. The patient takes the drugs but his anti-bodies have already pretty well defeated the virus. A few days later, he feels great. He says, “boy, those drugs work fast!”.

I have a feeling that a few hundred years from now, we will look upon surgery and drugs the way we look upon blood-letting today. As some absurd relic of superstition and ignorance.

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I Want a New Drug

According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, a new drug named Paxil (paroxetine) alters the personalities of people, making them more “easy-going and cooperative”.

Psychopharmaceuticals is what they call them.

Specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Don’t like your personality? It can be fixed. But remember, we are against drug abuse.

This drug is now available to doctors everywhere. They will probably be receiving colorful brochures advertising its virtues shortly. Maybe they will receive an invitation to take a free cruise to Latin America where the excellent effects of the drug can be described in luxurious detail. They will be given free samples of the drug to “try out” on patients. The drug will be expensive to prescribe. But that’s okay. Don’t worry– be happy: the American Psychological Association will be pressured to include it in DSM VI or VII or VIII or whatever, as a recommended treatment for “unhappiness”. That way, it will be covered by the real pimps of our drug culture: health insurance plans.

How far are we really from the idea that we should drug everyone in our society into placid, carefree submission? How long before we officially acknowledge that our dope laws are really concerned with stamping out competition, and not with eradicating “bad” behaviours?

It all stinks.