Big Pharama wants to put as many drugs in as many households as possible — whether they’re needed or not
Some people remember 1982, when some twisted humanoid put cyanide into extra-strength Tylenol capsules and killed seven people.
Well, forget about 1982. Today the danger is not from some sociopath lacing pills with poison, but from the drug companies themselves.
Big Pharma
“Iatrogenic” is a great Scrabble word, but it’s also one that you should remember if you or your kids see doctors or take prescription drugs. It means: induced inadvertently by a physician or medical treatment, including prescription medications. If, in the course of a procedure, a doctor nicks an artery and you die, that is an iatrogenic accident. If your son gets the antidepressant Wellbutrin for his bipolar disorder and he commits suicide in a manic psychosis, that too is an iatrogenic “event,” as the drug companies call it.
Each year in the United States, as many as 225,000 deaths are iatrogenic, making it the third leading cause of death. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports that about 106,000 deaths per year are from “non-error, adverse” effects of prescription meds, making this the fourth leading cause of death in the US. This dwarfs yearly automobile accidents and, in fact, accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined.
Only heart disease, cancer and strokes kill more Americans than prescription drugs. This shocking figure does not include drugs administered erroneously, nor does it include purposeful overdoses in suicide attempts.
Less deadly but certainly more pervasive is the indiscriminate mindfuck of our kids by the prescription and over-the-counter drug industry, or Big Pharma. Because, unlike the old days of “miracle” drugs and “better living through chemistry,” the name of the game now is profits and indiscriminate placement of as many drugs in as many households (and young bodies and minds) as possible.
It only takes one diagnosis
As a student at Montalvo Elementary and Balboa Middle schools in Ventura, Kelli (not her real name) says she “always kept to myself, couldn’t pay attention and had no friends,” although she did well in English and graduated from high school. At home, “because my father was emotionally abusive and in a constant rage, I stayed in my room and read. … It got to the point where my teachers begged my parents to get me on some kind of drug for what they called my ADD and depression.”
So Kelli’s childhood was an endless array of tests; meds like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Cymbalta, Xanax, Zyprexa, Adderall, Dexedrine and Ritalin; therapists; counselors; diagnoses. One diagnosis led to another and Kelli has been at various times diagnosed with clinical depression, attention deficit disorder (ADD), bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and borderline personality disorder (BPD).
There is no valid chemical test for any of these things. The diagnoses are completely subjective.
From the age of 11, Kelli used alcohol, speed, cocaine and marijuana, and at 13 began to “cut” (use razor blades to inflict small non-suicidal wounds), and binge and purge on food.
Kelli’s most recent diagnosis in 2004 was borderline personality disorder, and after that she was prescribed three more drugs — even though many experts believe borderline personality disorder does not respond to drug therapy. A borderline person is constantly crossing the “borderlines” between psychosis, neurosis and normalcy, and it’s difficult to pinpoint which condition to treat.
Throughout all this, Kelli was never given the one diagnosis that trumps all others: polysubstance dependence, or addiction to several drugs at once. Experimentation with illegal and non-prescribed drugs was described by her therapists as “self-medication,” but no one thought to use this diagnosis and get her off the drug merry-go-round.
Today Kelli takes only one drug — a mild dose of the antidepressant Wellbutrin — runs marathons, attends support groups like Narcotics Anonymous and has a job as a drug counselor. She has not had a drug or drink or cut or purged in three years.
“The single most important thing a psychiatric patient can do is to stop taking illegal and non-prescribed drugs, including alcohol,” says Dr. Lee Bloom, chief psychiatrist at the Pasadena Recovery Center, which is located on North Raymond Avenue and featured in VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab” series. Sometimes, just breaking these habits can undo years of damage, and can be the “cure” for prolonged ailment (if accompanied by a program of support groups and sponsorship) that prescribed drugs are not capable of providing yet.
The blame for Kelli’s fiasco is not all Big Pharma’s — therapists, physicians, parents and school counselors are too often too quick on the diagnosis and prescription trigger. But drug companies are the real culprits in the disgraceful overmedication of our children.
One step forward, two steps back
There was a time when the phrase “miracle drug” meant something. In the 1940s and 1950s, antibiotics, Salk’s polio vaccine, cortisone and potent psychiatric meds such as Thorazine changed and saved lives.
Americans came to believe that Big Pharma was capable of anything, forgetting that these new drugs also had powerful side effects. Antibiotics sometimes actually make people more prone to infection. Cortisone causes gross systemic changes, and Thorazine sometimes turns people into zombies.
Yet there remains a lingering desire to believe that drugs can cure anything, and Big Pharma takes full advantage of that.
Spending on prescription medicines for patients younger than 19 has increased by 85 percent over the past five years, according to an analysis by Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefits management company and subsidiary of the pharmaceutical concern Merck.
Moreover, American children are three times more likely than European children to be prescribed psychotropic medications for conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder, according to a report in the journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health.
But there’s no evidence that prescription drug-happy societies like ours are doing any better at keeping our kids mentally sound.
In fact, the prosperous, politically influential drug companies may be wreaking havoc on the minds and bodies of our youngsters — turning them into potential drug addicts, predisposing them to look for a chemical solution for every ache or pain when a simple thing like exercise or music often works much better.
In the battle for our children’s minds, drug companies use and oversimplified idea that lulls parents and kids into feeling secure about their drugs: the chemical imbalance theory.
Just a theory
Helping to fuel the current psych-med craze is the almost blind acceptance by doctors, therapists, school counselors and parents of the still-unproven chemical imbalance theory.
The chemical imbalance theory is a useful metaphor, and it is often cited in articles on depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), ADD and ADHD. But it is not a valid hypothesis (and the chair of the FDA’s Psychopharmacology Advisory Committee agrees.)
Drug companies would like us to think that psychiatric disorders are the result of a systemic glitch, and that if we take just the right set of psych meds our systems will be restored to a “normal” state and all will be well.
Why do the drug companies use an unproven theory as fact in describing how their drugs work? Because it’s easy for the patient (and the doctor) to understand — and it sounds so … scientific.
Jessica, a 19-year-old patient, describes her situation this way: “I have depression because I don’t have enough serotonin in my body. Serotonin is the chemical that gives people pleasure. My Lexapro contains serotonin, and when I take my Lexapro every day it keeps my serotonin at a constant level and [therefore] keeps my moods consistent.”
That would be a beautiful thing, if we knew it to be true. The official Forest Pharmaceuticals Web site for Lexapro, a commonly prescribed antidepressant, says that people with depression: “Have an imbalance of the brain’s neurotransmitters. …
One of these neurotransmitters is serotonin. An imbalance in serotonin may be an important factor in the development of depression and anxiety. Serotonin is released from one nerve cell and passed to the next. … Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors block the re-absorption of serotonin. … It is this blocking action that causes an increased amount of serotonin to become available at the next nerve cell.”
You may not understand all that (most therapists and many doctors don’t either) but it certainly sounds impressive. And it’s even better when accompanied by beautiful cartoon drawings and animations of neurotransmitters and synapses.
But the cute cartoons ignore this salient fact: The brain chemistry of depression and anxiety is not fully understood.
“Drug therapy is a little better than witchcraft, but not much. There are at least 100 chemicals in the brain that relate to brain function, and we know something about maybe six of them,” said the Pasadena Recovery Center’s Bloom.
Big Pharma wants us to believe that drugs restore the body to a “normal state.” Almost no drug restores normality. Drugs act on different systems in different and sometimes very powerful ways, and may produce an effect that makes the patient feel better or respond in a positive (or at least positive to their parents or doctor) way.
Think about it. Of all the people you know who have been diagnosed with a “chemical imbalance,” how many were tested chemically to arrive at this diagnosis?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which virtually all psychiatrists and therapists use to diagnose patients, plainly states that the cause of depression and anxiety is “unknown.”
Disease-mongering
According to a report in the Public Library of Science and Medicine, pharmaceutical companies may be inventing diseases in order to drive up their sales figures. Researchers said many conditions “are being medicalized” by the industry.
Restless leg syndrome, a relatively rare condition, is being promoted wildly by Big Pharma “detail men” because there are now drugs for it. Disease awareness campaigns funded by the industry are aimed at “promoting drug sales rather than informing people.”
And although ADD, ADHD, depression and bipolar disorder are valid and serious disorders, Big Pharma has certainly broadened definitions of them by promoting “tests” that nearly guarantee that millions will feel they are suffering from those conditions.
The worst part of the whole fiasco is that you can’t really trust “scholarly” research on the drugs you or your kids might take. Big Pharma at least indirectly funds most studies on emerging drugs, and drug companies are allowed to “throw out” non-supportive studies.
To make matters even worse, some “scholarly” articles are ghostwritten by PR firms employed by drug companies. An April editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association describes articles penned by Merck and Co. ghostwriters before Merck had eminent academics credited as primary authors. (These articles were about Vioxx, a drug no longer used because it sometimes kills people.)
Today, many drugs are minor variations on old products. The market is filled with astonishingly similar drugs to treat depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder.
For example, the new antidepressant Lexapro, which is more expensive than cocaine, is touted as “a cleaner, improved version” of Celexa. Actually, it differs only slightly (a molecule or two were modified) from the now generically available Celexa. Most doctors won’t tell you that, because Forest Pharmaceuticals gives away a lot of stuff to doctors to persuade them to recommend the more expensive product.
And many drugs are now used for purposes that have little or nothing to do with their original intent. Adderall, for example, is today the most widely used ADHD drug for kids and teenagers. It’s actually four different kinds of speed.
Adderall was derived from the amphetamine-based diet pill Obetrol, no longer used for weight loss because speed is so widely abused. Adderall sometimes helps kids with ADHD to calm down and focus, and many parents celebrate it because it keeps their kids quiet. But it’s still speed.
The good with the bad
To the concerned professional, it sometimes appears that Big Pharma just throws drugs together, and if these don’t kill the first few human guinea pigs, they go on the market.
Despite all the negatives surrounding Big Pharma, however, it must also be said —unequivocally — that drugs save lives and improve the quality of life.
In 1900, a person could expect to live maybe to the age of 50. Today, the average lifespan is nearly 80. In many ways, we Americans are healthier than ever. Better medical care and equipment, better diets and lifestyles, and more knowledge about health all contributed, but much of the credit also goes to pharmaceuticals.
Thousands of people with rheumatoid arthritis, HIV and AIDS, depression (yes, depression) and cancer are alive or living better lives because of prescription drugs. And we don’t even think about polio, diphtheria, malaria and typhoid anymore, thanks to amazing drug cures.
But we must remain concerned about what Big Pharma is doing, and ask whether we are being hoodwinked into taking more drugs than we need, or whether our children are being overmedicated and maybe even being set up for a lifetime of addiction.
