Readers Soapbox

MIND-ALTERING DRUGS BOTH BANNED AND PUSHED

It is widely believed that for several decades now the American government
has been waging a war against mind-altering drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, law enforcement agencies and the
criminal justice system all are charged with stopping American citizens
from using mind-altering drugs. Perhaps as many as 1 million Americans are
now being held in jail or prison on various drug charges.

But our local, state and federal governments are not in fact against
Americans using mind-altering drugs at all. Their efforts are aimed at
stopping Americans from using certain illegal, mind-altering drugs such as
heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

At the same time, other government agencies (the National Institute of
Mental Health, for example) are doing everything they can to get Americans
to take legal, mind-altering drugs.

Indeed, the entire mental health movement has become one highly effective
drug delivery system designed to persuade Americans to solve all their
problems with prescription psychiatric drugs.

By now, the ideology of the mental health movement is well-known. Virtually
every imaginable social problem, from unruly schoolboys (attention deficit
disorder) to rebellious teens (oppositional defiant disorder) to shy adults
(social anxiety disorder) is said to be caused by mental illness.

In turn, it is claimed that mental illness is a brain disease caused by a
subtle chemical imbalance which is cured by this or that psychiatric wonder
drug.

As luck would have it, along comes an Academy Award-nominated movie of the
life of John Nash Jr., Nobel prize-winning mathematician.

"A Beautiful Mind" depicts Dr. Nash as a diagnosed schizophrenic who
recovers with the help of the newer anti-psychotic medications heralded by
the pharmaceutical industry and lay groups such as the National Alliance
for the Mentally Ill, which, according to Mother Jones magazine, has taken
at least $11 million from the drug companies.

They say that in war the first casualty is truth and it has certainly been
killed here. For in fact the movie is based upon the biography of Nash by
Columbia journalism professor Sylvia Nasar, who says in this week's
Newsweek (March 11) that "moviegoers will be surprised to learn that
powerful new drugs like Clozapine played no role in Nash's recovery."

Indeed, Nash stopped taking psychiatric drugs in 1970, prior to the
invention of the so-called atypical anti-psychotic medications. Nash
himself told Nasar that he "emerged from irrational thinking ultimately
without medicine."

The false portrayal of Nash's life, as depicted by the movie, coincides
nicely with the ideology of the mental health movement, which has at times
appeared to be on a crusade to put nearly every man, woman and child in
Amercia on some kind of psychiatric medication.

Many Americans are coerced into taking these drugs without adequate
informed consent; many have even been forced to take them by American
courts. Some clinical psychologists, who have long had a relatively safe
and effective technique called talk therapy, have been clamoring for
prescription privileges, and New Mexico this month became the first state
to grant their wish.

In his new book, "Madness in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the
Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill," journalist Robert Whitaker
documents the heavy damage of the older anti-psychotics, whose use may have
caused more than a million cases of the nerve-damaging illness called
tardive dyskinesia, which Nasar says Nash avoided by quitting the drugs.

And Whitaker underscores the unjustified and hyperinflated claims made by
the drug companies (and the lay groups) for their newer, so-called atypical
anti-psychotics.

In fact, in America, where heavy medication is the norm for schizophrenia,
recovery rates are low, while in other countries that use such drugs less
often, recovery rates are far higher.

Americans use more illegal and legal mind-altering drugs than any other
country in the world. And yet we continue with a national drug policy which
sends the public two contradictory messages on psychoactive drugs. While
one arm of the government is trying to stop people from voluntarily taking
illegal mind-altering drugs, another arm is trying to get people to start
taking legal mind-altering drugs.

And neither the drug companies nor the lay groups care if you take
psychiatric drugs voluntarily or involuntarily. An odd irony of current
reforms for drug offenders is that the call for treatment instead of jail
time in effect means simply trading an illegal drug addiction for a legal one.

If we truly want to reform our war on drugs, we might start by returning to
the hallmarks of medical ethics harking back to Hippocrates of ancient
Greece: first, do no harm; informed consent; and patient autonomy.

It is the consistent and repeated violation of these hallowed principles of
medical ethics that calls into question the claims of the mental health
movement for parity.