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The Drugging of America
Matt Stoller over at MyDD has up an article that is more than worth reading, on the rise of the American security state, the decline of the left and how it was destroyed right after WWII, and a number of other topics. One part of his excellent essay that I want to run with just a bit is this:
Like an organism, American adapted to this constitutional order. Highways sprawled outward, suburbs ate the landscape, cities died and were reborn, and American dotted the world with military bases. Education turned into a competition for credentials, a cultural war where the winners turned to legal drugs and the losers turned to illegal drugs upon which there was apparently a war. Wars on concepts actually became quite popular, often initiated by those from Texas. Democrats became the party of the status quo, Nixon criminalized politics, David Broder-esque pundit middle-managers infected discourse, TV became Geraldo-ified and the civil rights movement detached from its class-based origins and moved to a rights-based model even as black nationalists convulsed from within. The culture became lost in dreams and pain, addiction mainstreamed itself, a superwealthy class helped itself to everything, and young boys and girls adopted the role model of 'more'. The religion of America turned to anticommunism, which morphed nicely into anti-enlightenment and anti-reason. America today is full of promise, but this last fifty years has been ugly and full of spite. Better living through chemistry, baby.
One thread throughout this paragraph is the medicalization of Americans. It's something we're all aware of, sotto voce, but that we don't talk about much. But it has gone much further than most people realize. Let's take antidepressant drugs. In 2002 about 10% of women were on antidepressants and about 1/3rd of all visits by a woman to a doctor resulted in the prescription of an anti-depressant. From 94 to 04 the incidence of anti-depressant prescription during a doctor vist per hundred increased by over 100%, for both men and women. Meanwhile prescriptions for antidepressants for kids have been soaring as well.
And that's only one class of psychoactive drugs - we aren't talking about use of stimulants (for example Ritalin on kids); of drugs like valium (central nervous system depressants used for anxiety) and so on.
Maureen Dowd once observed that in the (admittedly high ranked) circles she travels in, she doesn't know any (other?) woman who isn't on some sort of psychoactive chemical.
One could observe that the effects of the drugs aren't always all that they're cracked up to be:
Startling enough, a study was recently published in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry bearing strong evidence against the use of Paxil, a common antidepressant. Canadian neuroscientists found Paxil to have an 80 percent relapse rate after one year of use, while psychotherapy was found to have a 25 percent relapse rate. Children of all ages are uniquely sensitive to their environment. As a child's brain develops, it learns to cope with its environments and improve upon its social and learning skills.
Or one could observe that they have nasty side effects - like the loss of sexual desire, or for children, increased numbers of suicides.
Or one could suggest that even though they are useful for some people (who really are clinically depressed, as opposed to just unhappy, or who really do have something that might be called Attention deficit disorder rather than just having excess energy) that most of them are being prescribed by general practioners to such large numbers of people that it's highly unlikely they're being prescribed just to people who actually need them.
But the overall point is simple enough - a lot of Westerners seem to need psychoactive drugs to get through the day. We live in a courtier's society. You're supposed to be happy, and pleasant, all the bloody time. You're not supposed to be emotional - to have ups and downs. You're not supposed to get upset about things, to get angry, to get really sad. You're not supposed to be human. And your kids are expected to sit in a classroom for eight hours a day without making a fuss. (And we wonder why they keep getting fatter, too.)
A lot of people need something to take the edge off - to let them put up with the bullshit they have to tolerate every day. Or perhaps they need a pick-me-up; something to give them the energy to get through a 16 or 18 hour day in which they have to satisfy everyone.
There's no question that some people have messed up brain chemistry. But there are a couple of questions about what to do about it - whether drugs are the best way to deal with it (brain chemistry can and does change in response to non-drug therapies) and whether or not the majority of people, including children, who are getting these drugs, really need them.
There's nothing wrong with using pain killers to mask pain. But it's only masked, and if making the pain go away stops us from treating the underlying problem, then the pain medication is a bad thing, not a good one.
What is the underlying problem that so many people are using drugs to mask? Is it really that they are all just individually screwed up? Or is it a symptom of a bigger more societal problem?
