The drugging of America

Source WSJ

In the movie Crocodile Dundee; Dundee is brought back to America from his outback home by the newspaper heiress who wants his body bad.  She shows him off at a fancy party attended by her milieu and points out a middle-aged woman talking to her personal shrink.  Sometimes people need someone to talk to is the explanation she gives to her new found beau.

“Doesn’t she have any mates?” replies Crocodile.

It seems that she doesn’t but there’s no need for such therapeutic chatter in the US these days as psychiatric drugs take much less time to administer and are a very profitable alternative.

We have all sorts of diseases and syndromes the pharmaceutical companies and their pimps in the sickness industrial complex tell us. There’s everything from restless leg syndrome, excessive baldness, ADHD and variants of ADHD. Meanwhile most of the US male population under 40 is unable to get an erection it seems except for occasional 4-hour bouts of excessive stiffness.

Never mind, big Pharma comes to the rescue.  There has been a major increase in the prescription of powerful anti-psychotic drugs to meet these mental disorders. The mental disorder ADHD is an ailment they save for children but more and more adults are suffering from it we are told.

Concerta and Vyvanse are powerful drugs used to treat ADHD and use of these drugs tripled among 20 to 44 year olds over the last decade.  Figures released Wednesday by Medco Health Solutions reveal that overall use of psychiatric drugs among adults rose 22% over the same period (coincides with some economic developments doesn’t it?).  The findings also reveal that in 2010 about 10% of adult men used anti-depressants while 21% of women did.

Shire PLC makes Vyvanse and Adderall that are prescribed for ADHD and explain why the increased need for their product (remember, Shire is a corporation and can speak for itself as corporations have the same rights as people in the US). The increase, the corporation informs us, is due to an “..increased recognition of ADHD as a lifelong disorder as a main factor for growth in treatment in adults” the Wall Street Journal reports.  What authority is it that has this increased recognition?  I would hazard a guess that it would be the pharmaceutical, insurance and medical corporations. 

Why might I think that?  Well, psychiatric medications are, as the WSJ puts it, “Among the most widely prescribed and biggest selling class of drugs in the US.”  In 2010 Americans spent $16.1 billion on anti-psychotic medication, $11.6 billion on antidepressants and $7.2 billion on ADHD treatment.  That’s $34.9 billion in total and that’s just one section of the sickness industrial complex.  There are also heart drugs, cholesterol drugs, pain-killers and much more. 

Expenditure on ADHD drugs may be in third place but good old capitalist competition might remedy that as there has been “pronounced increase in medications to treat ADHD among young and middle adults, particularly women.”, and use among the over 65 year olds increased 30% over the last ten years.  “Marketing and awareness campaigns” are also a major reason for the increase in medicated Americans Jeff Jonas, the head of R&D for Shire PLC tells us.  He is probably talking about the same marketing that informed us that Iraq was behind 911: Damn, freedom is something to behold.

I am not opposed to modern medicine and there is a real need for most drugs including anti-psychotics. But what is missing from all their research of course is society. It is as if we exist as individuals independent of society.  The insecurity, competition and alienation that people feel contribute to our depression.  Being depressed is not an abnormal thing in many cases.

We are not much different than plants in this way. If the soil has no nutrients plants won’t grow or will be deformed and unproductive.  This is what happens to us as we struggle to survive in a capitalist system that is inhumane and places the accumulation of wealth, the surplus value created by Labor, above developing society in a way that nurtures us and develops our full potential. 

We Labor but do not control and determine the nature of this Labor process or own the product of it. For millions of people around the world, capitalism cannot even put them to work.  For others it does so under conditions reminiscent of the Dickensian world of 18^th and 19^th century Britain or the plantations of the Caribbean. Child Labor the selling of young boys and girls in to Labor slavery and sexual slavery is rampant. What is there not to be depressed about?

Sickness, like all things in the capitalist economic system is a business. It is something to be exploited for personal gain.  It is almost normal to be depressed living under such conditions.  But capitalist medicine will never address the real cause.  There’s no profit to be made in eliminating such illness.

The pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, health care companies presently exist to make money not make people healthy.   

A counselor once told me that it is better to make a little history than to simply be a victim of it. There is nothing worse than victimhood and the powerlessness that brings. For me, liberation from depression and drug use came through politics, through fighting in the Union and other movements to change the conditions in which we live, the real source of alienation and depression. In the workplace we have on a daily basis what The Institute for Labor and Mental Health once termed Surplus Powerlessness. It always pays to fight back.

It is one of our tasks to liberate medicine from the private sector and take the issue of human health and wellness out of the hands of the corporations and under public ownership.  Medicine in all its aspects will only work, like education or any other social service, if it is owned, run and managed by those who work in the field and who use it, not the few thousand CEO’s that head the corporations that reap billions a year drug dealing. Profit is not one of the ten commandments.