Oracle Online

It’s ironic that campaigns such as this get funding while our government forces foreign markets to accept tobacco products and advertising.

Some newspaper articles over the past few years highlight another, more creative and successful drug propaganda campaign. On Feb. 12, the New York Times reported that “the pharmaceutical industry spends $12 billion a year marketing to doctors.” The article stated that “doctors who have relationships with the pharmaceutical industry prescribe more of the expensive drugs.”

On Sept. 15, 2005, the same newspaper reported that one percent of adults ages 20 to 64 take the drugs prescribed to treat attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) even though, according to psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Lerman, "[these] stimulants are mood destabilizers. They make people more emotionally unstable, depressed, irritable, less social and obsessive.”

On July 15 of that year, the Times reported that a National Institute of Health (NIH) investigation found “44 government scientists have violated ethics rules on collaborating with pharmaceutical companies.” Included among these, “a senior researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health failed to disclose having received more than $500,000 from Pfizer while collaborating on a study of Alzheimer’s disease.”

As reported in the Pioneer Press on April 27, 2005, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found “doctors were more likely to prescribe antidepressants to patients who asked for them by name than to patients who didn’t ask for medication.”

In the article, Jon Schommer, a pharmacy professor at the University of Minnesota, asked, “Are we creating people that are going to be thinking there is a pill for every ill that they have? It’s called the medicalization of normal human experience.”

Psychiatrists dating back to Freud have used medical terminology to pathologize a wide range of human behaviors. As Thomas Szasz, himself a psychiatrist, points out, “Whereas in modern medicine new diseases were discovered, in modern psychiatry they were invented.”

As new “disorders” were and are invented, another idea was created and is still being reinforced. Namely, that there is an order existing in opposition to these disorders. To claim that someone has A.D.H.D. is to claim a standard for the rest of society. It is to claim that there is a norm to which everyone more or less measures up, with the exception of you, the individual with the “disorder.”

This universalizes human behavior and glosses over a wide diversity of human personality and experience, treating those whose personalities and behaviors are on the margins as deviant. It forms a neat bell curve and then tells those who differ too much from the mean that “you are aberrant.”

We’ve created sterile, standardized buildings, made children sit still in uncomfortable desks while adults talk at them about things which other adults decided they needed to knowčwithout actually consulting the childrenčfor seven hours a day. If any children actually find this boring and don’t pay attention, we tell them there’s something wrong with their brain chemistry instead of recognizing the artificial and deadening way we structure education. Of course, we repeat this structure, with slightly more room for interaction, in college, and again in the workplace.

Meanwhile psychiatrists and drug companies make more money. Are they responsible?

Perhaps the people handing out the anti-tobacco cards should instead focus their attention on pharmaceutical companies.