The Prescription Drug Epidemic
You may not believe me, but I’m normally a pretty happy person. I joke with my dog, I sometimes talk like Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd and other Looney Tunes characters and some of my sexy short stories will make you laugh. Nevertheless, there are things that get my goat and make my blood boil. Yes, bankers, lawyers, mortgage brokers, televangelists and other such scoundrels drive me up a wall and I might talk about them on another day, but for now I want to talk about the guardians of our health, and the custodians of our lives, our doctors.
Did you know we have the greatest health care system in the world?
Balderdash!
Don’t make me laugh. If our health care system is so good, how come the lifespan in the U.S. is 38th in the world on life expectancy and 33rd worst in the world for infant mortality. How come every so often you read in the paper or hear on TV that some poor slob had the good leg amputated instead of the diseased one or some other mindless accident. I’ve been to doctors who’ve been dumber than dirt. Having an MD designation is no guarantee that your doctor is smart enough to keep from killing you. Yeah, that’s right killing you. Don’t get my wrong there are some good doctors out there, but some times they’re harder to find than snow in the Sahara.
Example, eleven years ago our son was seriously ill from Crohn’s disease. He was slowly dying while in the hospital, while a team of so-called specialists played doctor. My wife wouldn’t have it. She got on the phone with her sister in California and asked if she could get a recommendation. Within a day or so, my wife got the name of a Crohn’s specialist in L.A. To make a long story short, she talked to him, knew he was competent and to the chagrin of the pretend doctors, took our son, along with x-rays and records to L.A.
That was twelve years ago and no thanks to his original doctors, my son survived. Those doctors like so many didn’t have a clue and a doctor without a clue is dangerous, because they feel like they have to do something and when they don’t have clue, many times they do the wrong thing.
I can see I could easily write a couple thousand words on this subject so I’m going to jump to the subject of my blog, the pharmacological cartel’s seeming conspiracy to get everyone in the world taking their drugs. I do not for a minute believe they are a benign entity. The evidence supports the opposite. From lobbyists in D.C. to high powered ads on TV and elsewhere to paying doctors to peddle their wares: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/business/09anemia.html?_r=1 .
When was the last time you watched the national six o’clock news and didn’t see at least six ads for prescription drugs? Have you listened to the side effects they recite? Some of the worst are severe diarrhea, blindness and death. Yes, Death! That’s pretty severe side effect. And it happens. Have you or your family ever taken Ritalin? It can kill! And the affliction it supposedly treats, ADHD, is questionable. In the old sane days it used to be called hyperactivity.
I had a hyperactive sister. She didn’t take any drugs and she lived long enough to become what I would call a passive old maid. Not so for some of these kids: http://www.ritalindeath.com/adhd-drug-deaths.htm .
When it comes to special ed in our schools we have a case of the old Catch 22 here folks. The kids, usually hyperactive boys are diagnosed by our friendly physician or psychiatrist as having that made up disorder ADHD. They are then put on one or two various psychotropic drugs which through the years have killed thousands and guess what. They are so drugged that they can’t do their school work. When kids don’t live up to there potential, (ability tests) they are candidates for special ed. So almost all of the special ed kids are on drugs. And many that aren’t special ed are on drugs too. In fact it’s like an epidemic.
And folks this epidemic is everywhere, bought and paid for by the drug cartels and the medical community.
I’m going to leave it at that…for now. Looking forward to comments.
For those who may be interested, my latest book is a novel about another one of my pet peeves, Televangelists. If the subject interests you check out The Bastard Preacher.
The Bastard Preacher Blurb
If there are truly evil people in the world, Jamie Lee Vincent would be a prime suspect.
Smooth and handsome, sociopath, Jamie Lee Vincent decides there’s easy money in religion after attending a big tent revival in his home town of Tyler, Texas. Catching the interest of Reverend Sonny Riverton’s youngest daughter, the lovely and vivacious Missy, he charms his way into her bed and in short order the Riverton clan.
Utilizing his charm and natural-born talent for chicanery, Jamie Lee takes over the ministry, and when his popularity soars finds himself among the most revered of television preachers. However, the wealth, fame, sex and power he now enjoys isn’t enough—nothing is ever enough!
THE ANSWER TO ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS!
Something that’s always bothered me is that the answers to some of the country’s and yes the world’s, most intractable and daunting problems are not so daunting if you apply a little common sense.
Take health care. Everybody, even Republican legislators agree health care costs are skyrocketing out of control. For example health care costs in the nineties constituted six percent (6%) of the economy. Today health care accounts for almost three times that, seventeen percent (17%). It you don’t think this is a serious problem, I have a bridge I’ll sell you. That is if the Wall Street Bankers haven’t already sold it to you.
If costs are not brought under control, and soon, predictions of 25 to 33% of our economy will go for health care, yet partisan bickering continues while America burns. C’mon guys, give us something. We know you can do it—can’t you? I used to think the previous administration was like the Keystone Cops in their inept pursuit of war and oil, but today’s congress really is like the Hatfields and the McCoys.
How do we get them together on heath care? It’s not so hard. Simply take away their health care away until they give the country effective bi-partisan health care reform.
Are there other simple answers out there? Sure why not. If some banks are too big to fail, simply yank out all your money and stop dealing with them. If everyone did this I guaranty they would get smaller—a lot smaller. Personally, I believe that everyone who lost a job, source of income or who’s net worth was seriously depleted should get one of those bonuses and I’m one of them. They seem to have plenty of money to go around. After all, three of these pillars of society recently announced they were giving thirty-four BILLION in bonuses to their employees. For those of you who are mathematically challenged that sum could make thirty four thousand employees, MILLIONAIRES.
Isn’t life grand?
Do you think internet pornography and gaming are a problem? I do. It seems like people would rather send their money to gamblers and pornographers than pay taxes. What’s the answer? Sin tax. Simply tax the shit…I mean hell out of them. That’s a tax even the republicans could love. Yes many if not all of them are based outside the U.S.. Simply cut them off at the border and if that’s not possible, change the tax laws and make any income derived from within our borders subject to U.S. income tax laws.
See how easy it is? How about rampant alcohol consumption. Surely you’ve noticed liquor and wine supermarkets popping up everywhere and if you think about it, the liquor section in your supermarket has grown to about twenty percent or more of the store’s entire display area.
Then there’s the prescription drug epidemic. Billions and billions of dollars are spent every year on legalized drugs, most of which are bad for the people that take them. Why? Because we are a drug culture. For our whole lives we’ve been led to believe the doctors know best and drugs are the answer to everything. And once started, people seldom get off, nor do they think they should.
I’ll bet now that I’ve showed you how you could come up with some simple solutions to the countries problems, you could solve our drug and alcohol addictions. Think about it. I’d like to hear from you.
On top of everything else, there’s an obesity epidemic which contributes to the zooming health care costs and the ubiquitous climate change problem.
You know, the climate change problem may actually be the answer to all our problems. Simply put all the climate change deniers (mostly republicans but some independents) in charge and in a hundred years or so, none of us will ever have to worry about anything ever again.
Now if any of you are interested in my writing allow me to present a couple new books I’m proud of
Fortune Cookie Magic
Meeting for lunch at a Chinese restaurant, Jill’s friends are shocked by the improbable, amazing tale of good fortune she spins. Lust, sex, love, pregnancy, and a planned marriage to a strapping young hunk, all from eating a red fortune cookie? A FORTUNE COOKIE? Give me a break!
The owner of the Chinese restaurant sets one of the miracle red fortune cookies in front of each of Jill’s friends. Gail, the hi-powered attorney, Rita, the gorgeous model, and Saundra, the uppity socialite, look at each other, then at Chad, Jill’s dreamboat fiancée. What should they do? What would you do?
Fortune Cookies is a deliciously naughty, whimsical, tongue in cheek, romantic story that leads four friends on a paranormal journey into the supernatural in search of love, fulfillment and happiness. It is a novel for couples, about couples. Erotic and funny, Fortune Cookies will send you searching Chinese restaurants for the elusive red fortune cookie!
Buy Link: Fortune Cookie Magic
Groovin’ in Waikiki
After winning an all expenses paid Hawaiian vacation for two from a local radio station, Jessica and her younger sister, Gloria, head to Honolulu with high expectations. Jessie meets and hits it off with a man who happens to live in the LA area, where she’s from and is suddenly looking forward to returning to LA.
Gloria, a showroom dancer in Las Vegas hotel, also meets a man, Kino, a Hawaiian hunk,who is renowned for his lothario like exploits. Just when she’s resolved to sharing his companyas a summer vacation romance only, she discovers they have something compelling in common.
Is there romance after vacation with this Hawaiian godlike incarnation?
Gloria doesn’t think so, but don’t count Kino out.
Buy Link: Groovin’ ‘n Waikiki
The Legal Drug Kingpins
In the nineteenth century entrepreneurs, generically known as Traveling Medicine Shows, used to crisscross our country in their horse drawn wagons, making a living by providing a minimal show for bored citizens and ultimately selling medicinal tonics, commonly known as Snake Oil. Whether they bought their product from a manufacturer or made the product themselves, buyers could usually count on a pleasantly flavored innocuous product that would probably give the recipient a little buzz due mostly to a small (10-15%) content of alcohol.. Though these merchants seemed harmless enough and provided a much needed break in monotony, the public never warmed to these men, sometimes calling them charlatans and flimflam artists.
Whether any of these medicine men had names like Pfizer or Merck or Lily or even Bayer I don’t know. What I do know and what America needs to realize, is that the Pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest businesses in the county and making billions of dollars a year selling legalized drugs, which in some cases are just as addictive, mind numbing and dangerous as their illegal counterparts. In effect they are today’s charlatans and flimflam artists. They are twenty-first century Snake Oil salesmen! Folks, this is one huge lobby.
Billions and billions of dollars are at stake here and right in the drug companies corner, is their pushers, the psychiatric industry and to a lesser degree the medical industry. Can’t sleep? Here’s a pill. Can’t wake up? Here’s a pill. In a bad mood? Here’s a pill. Can’t have sex? Here’s a pill. There is not a malady, medical or mental that the medical community doesn’t have a so called legal drug for and every drug out there has side effects (many serious) and or can be addictive. If I get a tooth filled, the dentist gives me a prescription for pain pills. For what? For four or five hours of diminishing marginal pain, I’m going to go to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for the dangerous addictive painkiller, codeine, or worse, which is an actual narcotic, derived from morphine, a derivative of opium. Have you or anyone you know, ever been to a Psychiatrist for treatment and not walked out with a prescription. It’s endemic. Psychiatrists no longer try to cure their patients neurosis’, they now, merely, try to exert control over them with drugs. They are the pimps of the legal drug cartel.
It is not only becoming apparent, to reasonable people, that legal drugs are dangerous to the people to whom they are prescribed, but more and more to the people around these people. The term ‘Postal’ was born from numerous instances of school and workplace slaughter, being tied to the perpetrator’s ingestion of psychotropic drugs, such as Prozac and Ritalin.
So why are legal drugs so expensive. I don’t know. You have to ask the drug companies. I do know this, many drugs that cost over a dollar a pill to buy, cost less than one cent to make. Yes I’ve heard the drug company arguments that new drug prices are high because they need to recover the enormous research costs that go in to new successful and unsuccessful products and yet the prices come down only when lower priced alternatives come on the market or the patent runs out, allowing other manufacturers to make the same drug. I also know that the same drugs sell in other countries for as low as ten percent of the price in the U.S. Why, you ask, if the drug cartel can make money at ten percent of the price there, they can’t here?
Selling medicine is no longer a way to make a living. It’s now a way to make a fortune, a world class fortune at that. Wake up America, we have become a culture of drugs. Drugs pervade our society. Last year drug sales in the U.S. topped $14 billion for antidepressants alone, $1.3 billion of which were for children. Many of these drugs are categorized in the same class as morphine, opium and cocaine. Bad enough we take these drugs ourselves but we give these drugs to our children, who trust us and have no say in the matter. More than 8 million American children are prescribed powerful stimulants, antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs for questionable if not dubious reasons.
We have become a nation of hypochondriacs. America is in the midst of a legal and illegal drug frenzy. Feel down? Here’s a pill. Nervous? Here’s a pill. Can’t swim ten laps? Here’s some pills. Want to experience something different? Try this. When will it end? I don’t mean to be an alarmist but your very life and those of your loved ones may be at stake here.
Author’s Note
Hi, I have already written one controversial essay, which may surprise you, advocating legalizing, illegal drugs. How can I promote legalizing illegal drugs on one hand and support moderation for legal drugs on the other hand? I’ll admit the two ideas appear incompatible at first glance but in reality they make a lot of sense. Legalizing illegal drugs would ultimately make them so inexpensive that a whole sub culture of criminals would be put out of work and if the country used legal drugs less, it would force those costs down as well, just like if we used less gas, it would go down.
The War That We Can’t Win
The Bottom Line; Before totally rejecting the merits of my editorial, I ask only that you keep an open mind and ask yourself, has anything we’ve done so far, worked?
The War That We Can’t Win
No not that one. There’s another war going on beside that one and it’s been going on a very long time, longer than I can remember and it’s unwinable. It is a war that we tend to forget about but from time to time we are reminded that we still are at war. When there is a huge drug bust or when a promising high school or college student dies from an overdose or several are killed in a drive by shooting or another drug lord is arrested in Columbia or another patch of marijuana is found in a National Forest or another meth lab in a neighbor’s basement is destroyed, then we are reminded that we are engaged in a daunting, frustrating, war that‘s impossible to win. The War on Drugs. But fight on we must. It’s the right thing to do, right?
Wrong!
Who says we have to keep beating our heads against the wall? I know this is unpopular but the hand writing is on the wall, we can’t win, so I’m advocating the extreme solution. Let’s put up the white flag and say ok drug pushers you win! Let’s surrender. Let’s legislate the thugs out of business. Let’s legalize drugs. Can it be any worse than it already is?
Ok the cat’s out of the bag. I’m a nut, a loon but let me explain my rational. It has been reported that some seven million Americans are already addicts with another ten million as users of varying degree. Folks, that’s almost six percent of us. Add another twenty million casual (occasional) users for anther seven percent for a total of thirteen percent, that for me is mind boggling. True legalizing drugs isn’t going to reduce the addicts and it may even increase them a little but the benefits are overwhelming.
Government figures state that something like eighty percent of violent and one on one crime is drug related. Why is that? I suppose we could assume that five or six million of the hard core addicts do not have jobs that are capable of supporting the cost of their addiction, so they are forced to mug, rob, steal, burgle or whore toward this purpose.
Make no mistake this is a growth business like any other business, the workers (pushers) are encouraged to bring in new addicts who are also encouraged to turn on friends, addicting them and so forth. The profit potential for sellers on up is enormous. It is said that the cost of the product sold on the streets is about one hundred times the production cost and that is the reason that despite the intrinsic dangers, the astounding profit potential keeps enlarging the pool of participants.
But what about the Downside?
What downside? If you’re talking about the availability of hardcore drugs to your kids, think about it. Right now it’s easier for a twelve year old to get crack than beer. Why? Because beer isn’t sold on the streets. You have to go into a store or a bar and buy it. If drugs were sold in stores, wouldn’t your kids have to go into a store to buy them as well. Can you see a teenager going into a store and buying a lid of weed or a vial of cocaine? Especially if you had to have a permit to buy there and a video camera would record every transaction. No way, Jose!
True, we would be encouraging existing and future addicts to make a direction of life decision. Do I want to lead a normal life or do I want to be a speed freak for the rest of my life? Probably fewer than you think would choose the latter and for those that did, they would no longer have to rob and steal to feed their habit and that’s the big bonus to legalizing drugs. Crime would fall up to eighty percent and the country would save billions and billions a year on law enforcement, courts, prosecutors, public defenders and prisons.
And here’s the best part. Legalizing drugs would put the drug cartels out of business. The drug scumbags from the drug lords on down to the street pushers will have to find another and most likely less harmful scam, for no one in their right mind would buy illegally on the street when they could buy legally from a licensed store.
Can it be that easy?
I know it’s not that simple, that there are a lot of nuances and intangibles but I’m not talking about a plan. This is an idea. Let the legislators work out the nuts and bolts. As far as I can see legalizing drugs would be a ridiculously easy solution to the rampant crime that exists today and remember, it wasn’t that long ago (approx. a hundred years) that illegal drugs were legal and since narcotics were made illegal their use, on a per capita basis, has increased and crime has gone through the roof.
Viewpoints I – A look at Psychiatry
From time to time I will post viewpoints from academicians which tend to mirrorm mine. Here is the first of such postings:
MORE BRITISH ACADEMICS SPEAK OUT!
Tom Cruise is most certainly right. Psychiatry is, and will remain a
pseudoscience and the only caveat to that statement is that it may give it
more credibility than it deserves.
I speak as a medical ethicist and I congratulate Tom Cruise first for his
courage to speak out on such issues and second on his obvious dedicated
interest in the subject demonstrated by his knowledge of the issues. The
detractors especially those who support psychiatry because it has ‘helped
them’ miss the point. Tom Cruise is speaking about the subject, they are
speaking about themselves. The subject is this. Psychiatry demands
recognition within the healing arts and claims to be both a science and a
branch of medicine. It is neither for these reasons.
For years psychiatry has propagated a myth that mental illnesses are
biological and has even gone so far in many cases to deny that we are
creatures of free will at all. For years those who refuse to accept this
dogma have asked them for evidence, not conjecture, to support this
position. It has not been forthcoming and the best they have ever been able
to come up with are “maybes”, “possiblies” and “we believe”. Not one piece
of real evidence has ever been adduced and it places this branch of
‘science’ in the same category as that that searches for the Yeti and the
Sasquatch, except of course that those who believe in Yetis and Sasquatches
have never had access to the vast research funds that the biopsychiatric
fraternity have.
Medicine is bound by an ancient and laudable tradition of ethics in which
primum non nocere (first do no harm) is the foundation stone that the
doctrines of beneficence and non-malfeasance are built on. Those ethics are
abrogated and control has primacy over care, first do no harm but second do
what you like. Lying to patients in any branch of medicine is a breach of
that ethic. Forcing medication is a breach of that ethic, denying the right
of consent is a breach of those ethics and if those ethical conditions
cannot be met then psychiatry does not belong in their world.
Respect for autonomy is a pillar of medical ethics. Autonomy is a myth in
psychiatry and cannot be found in any psychiatric hospital or in any society
where medication with dangerous drugs is a condition of liberty. Justice is
the fourth pillar of medical ethics and as with the others it is totally
absent in psychiatry. Where is the justice in telling patients that ‘mental
illness is for life’ when that excludes them from many areas that those of
us who are not ‘mad’ take for granted. Where is the justice in lying to
patients that mental illness means they must take drugs forever when real
science has shown that is not the case. Where is the justice in detaining
people against their will, without due process, on the spurious grounds that
they are a risk to themselves. Where is the justice in billions of dollars
being spent on mood adapting drugs while those drugs that save lives ‘cannot
be afforded.’
Even if psychiatry were a ‘science’ it would belong in the field of what is
now described as the most dishonest science of all, Biological Science.
This once noblest of sciences was originally a search for knowledge and
truth. It is now a search for dollars and when truth gets in the way of
that, it is buried. Case after case is now coming to light where the
bioscientists have lied to get research dollars, kudos and personal wealth.
Some of these scientists gone bad are now facing well deserved jail
sentences. Manufactured mental illnesses have provided the biggest growth
industry to these characters, puffing up egos and fattening wallets. Real
science and real people have suffered the cost of this with real illness
neglected and real science ignored.
Biopsychiatry is the biggest pseudoscientific lie since eugenics, to which
it is of course closely related. A big hand to Tom Cruise and all who keep
reminding us of this.
Barry Turner
Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law
University of Lincoln
London, England
Silly Things 