Corporate Drug Dealers

The corporate drug dealers of America, with the blessing of the drug-dispensing medical profession, has declared that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance and can be “cured.”

I wish to challenge that claim.

If, as they say, this “cure” has been discovered, why is it a different cocktail of expensive mind-altering drugs for each patient? And why, in the case of a single patient, do physicians experiment with so many different combinations of expensive mind-altering drugs?

Anti-depressants, by the way, account for more public and private expenditure than all other drugs combined, including $1,000-a-month AIDS treatments.

This doesn’t sound like a cure to me. It sounds like a racket, a racket that is taking a terrible toll on human lives. Two that I know of personally.

They tried every expensive mind-altering drug in the catalog on my friend Holly. They finally decided they had the right combination when she started sleeping 18 hours a day. Then they decided they had a successful outcome. And it was successful, for them.

If they had taken the time and trouble, they would have found she had multiple sclerosis, but it was easier to whip out their prescription pads. As it was, the correct diagnosis was not made until years later, when she finally found out that she wasn’t crazy and began to understand what was bothering her and get proper treatment.

Their laziness and ineptitude took a serious toll on her life.

After a stroke 12 years ago my father suffered severe anxiety, so they gave him an expensive anti-anxiety drug. Not surprisingly, this made him depressed, so they gave him an expensive anti-depressant, on top of the expensive anti-anxiety drug.

As a result of these expensive anti-anxiety drugs and these expensive anti-depressants, my father has been, for 12 years, more anxious and depressed than anyone I have ever seen in my life.

But he sleeps 18 hours a day, so that’s a successful outcome. And it is, for the corporate drug companies and their dealers masquerading as healers. He’s a cash cow! A two-fer!

When he was a teenager, my father ran over his arm with a truck. He had it propped up and chocked to fix something and the chocks gave way. A tire ran right over his elbow. They told him he’d never move his arm again.

He carried a briefcase full of bricks and squeezed a rubber ball and wound up playing semi-pro hockey, and by the time I came on the scene, he just had a scar and a funny story to tell.

My father’s stroke was comparatively minor. No one wants to have a stroke, but from what they told me, this was the kind of stroke people have a good chance of recovering from.

I am absolutely certain that my father could have recovered from his stroke if he had not lost, completely and utterly, his sense of self.

And he had the privilege of paying tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, from the medical benefits he accrued through his lifetime of work, for the expensive drugs that destroyed his life.

His stupid doctor I don’t care about, but to the corporate drug dealers who pocketed all that money, I have a message: You have not heard the end of this. My name is Inigo Montoya…