Dream with Me for a Moment
An excerpt from Phillip Day's new book "The Mind Game"
Due for release through Credence, July 2002

Psychiatry is widely accepted by most today as a bone fide branch of traditional medicine. But how many of us know the full history of this 'science of the mind?' Starting in this EClub issue, we commence a series of articles excerpted from health researcher Phillip Day's landmark new book, The Mind Game, which thoroughly investigate the abuses going on in the huge 'mental health' industry today.

The area of psychiatry that really worked for its expansion was in the realm of drug treatment. As we shall see, psychiatry can justifiably be charged with laying the foundations for today's runaway drug culture. How, in later years, the mental health industry would remain firmly unapologetic with regard to its role in popularising the recreational use of drugs, continually failing to bring itself to condemn the habit, while simultaneously fostering drug dependency in its own patients, many of them children. Indeed, as we shall see, psychiatry remains one of the leading drug pushers in the world, hooking millions on its expensive and extremely lucrative medications. With its earning power through the pharmaceutical industry finally appreciated and welcomed by the mainstream chemical industry, psychiatry now has its place in medicine secured, even in the minds of most traditional physicians.

Psychiatry originally started out as a great embarrassment to traditional medicine, which repeatedly refused to bring this renegade practice into the fold. Later, electroshock and lobotomies, coupled with the sheer human rights abuses that were starkly evident to all but psychiatry itself, had kept the whispers susurrating around the corridors of medical officialdom. Psychiatry however was canny enough to recognise it had a public relations problem, even if it could not, incredibly, fully appreciate why it was happening. With the advent of America's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), inaugurated after World War 2 under Robert Felix, the mental health industry began to employ some well-needed political spin to add some spit and polish to its tarnished public persona.

Nothing helped more to integrate mental health into mainstream medicine, in the public's view, than when psychiatry began prescribing drugs to its patients to control their behaviour. This was 'real' medicine being prescribed after all. Since the inauguration of modern allopathic medicine, instituted so effectively under America's Abraham Flexner and John D Rockefeller in the early years of the 20th century, drug regulation, the training of doctors in institutions funded by the drug industry and the modern drug-dominant health system have enjoyed an unparalleled financial and social success, which the allopathic system jealously guards to this day. Psychiatry remained outside this hallowed realm; viewed along with other alternative health 'charlatans' as unscientific and old-fashioned quackery. Yet World War 2 had demonstrated to the medical and government powers that human thought, behaviour and desire could be controlled using artificial means. Even after the war, as we have seen, the eugenics ideal lived on. Indeed, questions as to the whereabouts of many leading Nazi psychiatrists and doctors following the uncovering of unspeakable horrors in Europe were quietly buried or diverted, hardly earning any mention in the media of a post-World War 2 Europe, keen to put the traumas of the past behind it.

But after the war, psychiatry was truly to enter the drug arena, and thereby assure itself of massive funding and a mainstream social status as a reward for all its efforts. Now, straitjackets could be discarded in favour of a more mobile and profitable restraint - the use of drugs.

THE DRUG LANDSLIDE BEGINS
US President Howard Taft recognised the brutal impact of psychiatric drugs on society, remarking in 1910: "The illicit sale [of cocaine] and the habitual use of it temporarily raises the power of the criminal to a point where in resisting arrest, there is no hesitation to murder. It is more appalling in its effect than any other habit-forming drug used in the United States."

Even as recently as the 1950s, society still traditionally frowned on mind-altering substances, disdaining those who took them as weak and addicts who could not help themselves. Bruce Wiseman comments that "…this view of drugs may seem ancient, but it came from centuries of mankind's experience with them. After enough eyewitness accounts of fathers, sisters and acquaintances decaying, living the fate of the opium smoker, the morphine addict, the cocaine user - few needed further convincing." Interestingly, today there are those who frown upon recreational drug use while addicted themselves to pharmaceutical medication.

Back in the 1800's, bromides had been used to desensitise the central nervous system, assisting in calming the patient. Raw opium was considered too dangerous; its historical, addictive properties were widely known. The pathetic plight of the opium addict caused those familiar with the problem to develop approaches they believed would relieve the sufferer of their addiction. A new substance was brought forward and named 'morphine'. By 1870, physicians were complaining that morphine itself was horrendously addictive and was beginning to cause more problems than the opium addiction it was expected to cure.

In 1898, a solution to the morphine problem was developed and hailed as the non-addictive way forward. The new substance was called 'heroin'. Like laudanum before it, heroin, during the next decade, gained its now-famous notorious reputation for its soft-cushioning, other-worldly, central nervous system and mental effects, while simultaneously locking the patient's mental faculties and dependence into its golden brown embrace. Worse still, heroin, so powerful and thus able to be diluted for greater profit and illicitly distributed to those in need, became the drug of choice for unscrupulous dealers who peddled the narcotic and built their businesses on the misfortune of others.

The dawning of a new and uncontrollable drug problem breeding crime and violence was a new experience for western societies, who found themselves powerless in knowing what to do to combat the scourge. Once discovered, it became almost impossible to extirpate the demand for the insidious new substances, which offered their devotees an alluring escape from the pain and drudgeries of normal life. Psychiatry too was failing to provide an answer, attempting from the outset to pathologise the 'new disease of addiction', trying to cure addicts of their affliction through the use of electroshock and lobotomy procedures.

Barbiturates too were already in circulation, able powerfully to sedate the suffering patient, rendering them more amenable to control. Chloroform also had, for half a century, provided the means to 'knock a patient out', thus removing the horror of having to endure operations fully conscious. In the 1920s, it became possible to synthesise barbiturates and provide the burgeoning drugs market with a constant, reliable, regulated supply of the new product. The 1930's saw the advent too of the stimulant amphetamines, with the American Medical Association even stating that with Benzedrine ('bennies') "…no serious reactions had been reported", and that the public could, under strict supervision of their physician of course, take the drug recreationally to create "a sense of increased energy or capacity for work, or a feeling of exhilaration."

Lester Grinspoon MD articulates in a 1977 report how the medical system was keen to promote their new products to the public as 'safe and effective', with no appreciable downsides:

"Of all the myths surrounding the amphetamines, that of their alleged non-addictiveness is the most transparent, although when they were first introduced, they were hailed as having little or no addictive potential. This is not surprising, as the medical establishment originally guaranteed as non-addictive almost every drug known to cause addiction.… Cases of addiction were reported almost immediately, but the drug industry was so successful in reinforcing and sustaining early medical enthusiasm, that as late as 1958, C D Leake could categorically state that 'no clear case of addiction to amphetamines has been reported.'"

'DOLOPHINE'
World War 2 Nazi Germany, with its unrestricted and well-funded drug research, produced dolophine, named after its Führer. In the aftermath of the war, this drug was renamed 'methadone'. Psychiatrist Marie Nyswander was one of many enthusiastically promoting methadone as the non-addictive solution to heroin. However, by 1963, Nyswander and fellow psychiatrist Vincent Dole, of the Rockefeller Institute, were admitting methadone addiction in their patients, but proffered that it could replace heroin addiction for life.

Dr Michael Smith, of the Lincoln Detox Program in New York, explains how the 'cure' soon became the new problem: "Withdrawal from methadone is a long, drawn-out, brutal experience. There is not a two-to-five-day crisis of vomiting and tremors, as with heroin. These and other frightening symptoms occur for weeks and usually months on end."

Not surprisingly, methadone continued to be touted after the war as the permanent replacement to heroin. By the 1970's, methadone maintenance programs were treating more than 75,000 patients across the United States. In 1987, The Columbus Dispatch was reporting that less than 1% of methadone junkies were able to stop using the drug.

MUGGINGS ANDS MONEY
Clinics themselves became the cause of the problem. By the mid-1970's, Nyswander and Dole were themselves admitting the failure of their methadone program. A 1987 article in the Journal of Psychiatric Drugs declared: "Approximately half of those who were now paying for [methadone] maintenance reported resorting to crime to pay their clinic fees. As one client described the situation: 'The clinic has now become my drug dealer. I am committing crimes to pay for an addictive drug [methadone]. It's really not much different than the street."

Predictably, psychiatry was to pioneer another drug to cure the methadone problem. This time 'ibogaine' became the hope for an end to the addictions, which psychiatry itself had brokered. However ibogaine's notorious reputation gained it a Class 1 regulation (dangerous and of no medical value) and treatment with it was outlawed in the United States. Bruce Wiseman sums up:

"The lessons of heroin and methadone have been poorly learned by our mental health experts. Most drug addicts already feel they are in a netherworld from which there may be no return and, so far, these experts and their experimental cures have only led them deeper into it."

MASSIVE MARKETS = MASSIVE REVENUES
The explosion of pharmaceutical drug use for mental disorders has fuelled a huge expansion in drug sales globally. Billions of dollars are spent annually in North America alone to treat the 'mentally ill'. These medications have become among the most expensive costs of the US mental healthcare system. The elderly especially have struggled with the rising cost of prescription drugs in Canada, prompting both candidates and their parties in the year 2000 elections to address the issue of the elderly being unable to pay for their medications.

IMS Health US reported in their March 2001 annual report that psychotropic medication sales increased by 21% over the previous 12 months. Sales of medications relating to treatment of mental illness were second throughout the global market.

An IMS Canada Report for the province of British Columbia in 1997 indicated a 66% increase from 1992-1996 in the number of psychiatric prescriptions issued. A recent US study showed that the number of 2-4 year olds on psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac soared 50% between 1991-1995.

DRUGS AND CRIME
Given that psychotropic drug use for mental patients began in earnest in the 1960's concurrently with the releasing of psychiatric drugs, such as methadone, heroin, LSD and Thorazine into Crowley's drug-fuelled, sexually 'liberated' society for 'recreational purposes', we can get a clear picture of what psychiatry has really done for the world if we analyse social statistics coming out of the United States during this period.

Between 1960 and 1992, the US violent crime rate known to police went from around 105 violent crimes per 100,000 to around 760/100,000. During the same period, the aggravated assault rate known to police jumped from 80/100,000 to 440/100,000. The forcible rape rate known to police went from 10/100,000 to 43/100,000. Arrests for drug abuse violations among African Americans soared from 220/100,000 to a peak of 2,400/100,000 in 1990. Those for Caucasians rose from 50/100,000 to 400/100,000 in 1992.

A NEW UTOPIA?
Drugs which produce altered mental states of any kind have always instinctively appalled ordinary citizens, symbolising weakness in the person taking the drugs, a loss of control over one's most basic social responsibilities, and the embarking upon a spiral of addiction often leading to death. That drugs producing these effects could simultaneously be viewed by other, more influential groups within society as a major evolutionary step in the consciousness development of mankind seems, at first glance, dismissible and fantastic. But are we truly surprised when research psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel of the University of California Los Angeles' Department of Behavioral Sciences asks us in 1990 to:

"…dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe drugs? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones, but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death? Imagine an alcohol-type drug that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, driving under the influence, or workplace problems. Would you care for a cigarette that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco, but as harmless as clean air? How about a pain-killer as good as morphine but safer than aspirin; a stimulant more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine; a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more enjoyable than a martini; or a user-friendly hallucinogen that is as benign as a movie?"

Siegel argues that for man to be truly happy, he must satiate his four desires: hunger, thirst, lust and, predictably, the need to become intoxicated. However one views the opinions of the influential Siegel (to which he is, of course, entitled), one must decide what is to be made of the 10 million Americans who take tranquillisers each year, and the millions elsewhere in the world who are hooked on benzodiazapines and other 'popular' medications people like Siegel are pushing.
(…to be continued)