- - -
America has a drug problem. I’m not referring to the “war on drugs” which has resulted in the persecution and disproportionate incarceration of people of colour, I'm referring to a prevalent attitude in America. And while what I'm talking about may seem like I'm merely conflating separate issues, it needs to be realized that what I'm describing is a multi-faceted series of different drug problems that in reality all together add up to a very large overall drug problem.
One facet of the overall problem is the recreational use of drugs. Not only does this include the use of illicit drugs (in 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older—9.4 percent of the population—had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002) and drugs like marijuana (which is gaining in acceptance and transitioning from illicit to legal), it also includes the use of legal drugs like alcohol. You had a bad day? You don’t like your situation in life. Then use your (preferably legal) drug of choice. It’s almost like Americans are trying to prove Darwin was wrong.
But it doesn’t end there. Another facet I’m referring to the pharmaceutical complex in America often referred to as “Big Pharma” and the ever expanding impact that they have. While Big Pharma does serve a useful purpose in creating lifesaving vaccines and medications for genuine medical conditions, the reality is that they have absolutely no intention of creating any more actual cures. Let's face it, they're still kicking themselves for curing polio. The simple reality is that there’s no profit in curing anything when they can help you to “just live with it”. If you're taking a medication for the rest of you're life then that's not a cure at all, it's merely living with it! If you took you're car to the mechanic to fix a transmission, but you still had to constantly add transmission fluid to it, you wouldn't consider your transmission actually fixed now would you?
To exacerbate this is still another facet: There’s the constant adverts for the latest drug aimed at the general public with the goal of the consumer asking for a certain drug rather than the far more logical approach where your doctor tells you what drugs you should use, if any. While many countries allow over-the-counter drugs to be advertised, only the United States and New Zealand allows prescription drugs to be advertised on television. Frankly, Big Pharma has abused this tolerance by pushing drugs that may not be effective or applicable to their conditions on viewers. In the United States, TV adverts for pharmaceuticals must list the major side effects that were detected during the drug's safety trials; this disclosure can give the false impression that older drugs (i.e. the ones that came out before TV advertising was an option) are safer than all these “newfangled” drugs, when in fact the older drugs tend to have just as many side effects as the new ones do. (e.g. The litany of side effects for aspirin would fill several pages.) Not only that, but in 2015 there were more than 1 million reports of drug side effects were file, an increase of five-fold since 2004. These are drugs used to treat diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and diabetes are among those with the greatest number of reports. What’s more, as demonstrated by the myriad lawsuits resulting from consequent injuries from the use of so many of these “latest and greatest” drugs, pharmaceutical companies rush their latest chemical “miracle” before they’ve properly and extensively tested them. Between modern knowledge of chemistry and the capability of creating complex computer models capable of creating predictive interaction models, the vast majority of side effects should already be either eliminated before they ever go to market or should keep the new drug in question from getting to market in the first place.
Still, that’s just a part of the overall problem. Another facet is that it seems that for every minor problem there’s a drug. Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted, Big Pharma’s credo has been: “When the medication is ready, the disease (and patients) will appear.” Who knew so many people suffered from restless legs? And they’re effectively creating new “diseases” all the time or blowing conditions like ADHD way out of proportion. There wouldn't be such an issue if we stopped trying to schedule every nanosecond of a child's life and let them learn naturally through this crazy thing called playing. I don't mean sports or any other structuralized format but just let them have fun, make it up as they go, and free-form explore the world around them without panicking because of scrapes and bruises.
Furthermore, yet another aspect is that far too many psychiatrists and other doctors are more readily inclined to prescribe drugs for nearly every malady, whether it be physical or mental illness, rather than turning to other means and methods like actually getting people to accept that the universe is an inherently unfair place and to find ways of changing the aspects of your life that you can change and dealing with those aspects you cannot change. While it’s not easy, doing that without the use of drugs can be done successfully.
This particular issue of the push for drugs to solve all of the woes
was brought into clear focus for me while I was going through a
psychological evaluation at the Penn Foundation regarding the Depression
I've been dealing with for decades and was exacerbated by the stroke I
survived. The psychiatrist started not just recommending but
effectively pushing "antidepressant" drugs as an answer to the point
where I was seriously wondering just how deep into the pockets of
their pharmaceutical rep he was. It took me several times of stating
"No drugs!" before he finally got the hint that "No" means "No" even
when I say it.
Do people suffer from chemical imbalances in their brain leading to problems like Depression, et al? Yes. But throwing drugs at it forever rather than finding and actually fixing the problem isn't the right answer (see aforementioned transmission analogy) unless you think that profits regardless of how those profits are achieved are always the right answer, that is.
In this case, I certainly believe that if anyone there has a
drug problem it's due to the psychiatrist for so stubbornly refusing to
consider other options. One of the many issues I have with my ever
starting any kind of antidepressant regimen is the fact that there's
still so much trial-and-error (with far too many errors) and hit-or-miss
(again, too much miss) in prescribing the drugs in the first place. I
know this from the various friends who are currently on various
antidepressants and who have been for years, a couple of whom I've
personally known for a decade and more. I will not be a guinea pig for
something that they should be able to accurately prescribe if medicine once again mattered more than profits.
Drugs are nothing more than chemical crutches and like physical
crutches should be used only when absolutely necessary. Crutches are
meant to be temporary, not permanent “solutions”. The big problem I'm
describing is a multifaceted reliance on drugs to solve every problem
rather than trying to actually repair or cure the medical ailments, and
getting active in the political ones.
by Rev. J.T. Smith
