home / subscribe / donate / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events
|
|
|
How a Tiny Alaskan Indian Tribe Got Billions in Pentagon Contracts by Jeffrey St. Clair; Dems and Dives by Alexander Cockburn; Spooky Grants: More on the CIA's Recruitment of Campus Professors by David Price. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
|
Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories April 2 / 3, 2005 Alexander Cockburn April 1, 2005 Tom Barry Rahul Mahajan Charlie Cray
/ Jim Vallette Dave Lindorff Zeynep Toufe Suzan Mazur Michael Dickinson Stan Cox Ra Ravishankar Daniel Wolff
March 31, 2005 Sharon Smith Ron Jacobs Tariq Ali Michael Dickinson Kanak Mani
Dixit Mitchell Zimmerman Xuan-Trang
Ho Dave Zirin Joe Bageant Jeff Halper Website of
the Day
March 30, 2005 Gary Leupp Ralph Nader
/ Kevin Zeese Chase Madar Toni Solo Jackie Corr Ahmad Faruqui Mike Roselle Jude Wanniski Francis A.
Boyle Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of
the Day
March 29, 2005 Ralph Nader Gary Leupp Sonia Cardenas Stew Albert Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Carl G. Estabrook
March 28, 2005 Jeremy Scahill Sonali Kolhatkar Sasha Kramer Kevin Zeese Tom Stephens Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Newton Garver Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
March 26 / 27, 2005 Gary Leupp Peter Linebaugh Marc Robert Laura Carlsen Saul Landau
/ Puja Patel Dave Foreman Fred Gardner Jennifer Matsui Dave Lindorff Dharma Adhikari Joshua Frank Patrick Barr Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy Baroud Jackie Corr Ben Tripp Dr. Susan Block Mickey Z. Justin Taylor Richard Joseph Poets' Basement
March 25, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons Yoshie Furuhashi Pat Williams Mark Engler Rahul Mahajan Lance Selfa Ralph Nader John R. Llewellyn Jo Guldi
March 24, 2005 Joshua Frank Talli Nauman Martin Espada Dave Lindorff Elaine Cassel Jack McCarthy Jack Random Barbara Ferguson Suzan Mazur Dorreen Yellow Bird Andrew Wimmer
and Mark Chmiel
Patrick Bond Mike Whitney Becky White Michael Donnelly Niranjan Ramakrishnan Ashley Smith David Swanson Derrick O'Keefe Paul A. Moore Dalton Walker Patrick Cockburn
March 22, 2005 William Blum Jim Vallette Greg Moses John Farley Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Dave Lindorff James Petras
March 21, 2005 John Walsh Werther Mike Stark David Swanson James T. Phillips Mike Ferner Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts Stew Albert Website of
the Day
March 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Tom Reeves Saul Landau Alan Maass Ron Jacobs David Green John Blair Steve Greenfield Ben Tripp Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Sarah Schaffer Warren Hastings Poets' Basement
March 18, 2005 Dave Zirin Richard Thieme John Walsh David Swanson Ben Terrall David Boyle Dorreen Yellow Bird Mokhiber /
Weissman Greg Moses Website of
the Day
March 17, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Bill Quigley Brian Cloughley Gary Bass / Adam Hughes Dave Lindorff Jude Wanniski Alexander Billet John Ross Website of the Day
March 16, 2005 Ralph Nader William Cook Kevin Zeese Jackie Corr Alan Maass David R. Kolker Cindy Ellen
Hill Paul Craig
Roberts
March 15, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Hadas Their
/ Katrina Yeaw Alison Weir Matt Koehler Evelyn Pringle Harry Browne
March 14, 2005 Ralph Nader David Miller Stan Cox Mike Roselle David Swanson Simona Sharoni Dave Lindorff Dorreen Yellow Bird Tom Barry Website of the Day
March 12 / 13, 2005 David H. Price Noam Chomsky Laura Carlsen Stan Goff Valentina Nicoli Michael Leonardi Saul Landau
/ Sarah Anderson Joe Bageant Manuel García,
Jr. Greg Moses James J. Brittain Ben Tripp Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Walter Brasch Ramzy Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
March 11, 2005 Jerry Fresia Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff William James
Martin Muqtedar Khan Kathryn Ledebur Mike Whitney Dave Zirin Website of the Day
March 10, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts John Marc Leas, Colleen McLaughlin
and Ashley Smith Larry Birns Michael Donnelly Luis Gomez Jackie Corr Uri Avnery Website of the Day
March 9, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Ward Churchill Robert Fisk Bernice Powell Jackson Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Michael Donnelly James Reiss Vijay Prashad
March 8, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Kurt Nimmo Suzan Mazur Evelyn Pringle Giuliana Sgrena Elaine Cassel
March 7, 2005 Dave Zirin Brian Cloughley John Chuckman Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot Fred Gardner Richard Neville Uri Avnery
March 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Tom Reeves Jenna Orkin Tom Barry Joshua Frank Moshe Adler Jane Stillwater Omar Barghouti / Jacqueline
Sfeir Christopher
Brauchli John Pilger Raúl
Zibechi David Krieger Three Takes on Nepal Surendra R. Devkota Bhishma Karki Joseph Pietri Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
March 4, 2005 Frederick Hudson
March 3, 2005 Pat Williams Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Greg Moses Lynne Landes Nelson P. Valdés John Ross
March 2, 2005 Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Mike Roselle M. Junaid Alam Suzan Mazur Jackson Thoreau Michael Donnelly Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
March 1, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons David Lindorff Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders Ron Jacobs Tanya Garcia Joseph Pietri Kona Lowell Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
the Day
Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
Marcos Norman Finkelstein Steve Niva Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams Steve
J.B. Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber Wendell
Berry CounterPunch
Wire Cindy
Corrie Gore Vidal Francis Boyle
Subscribe Online
|
Weekend Edition But the Pills Your Mother Gives You...Death, Depression and ProzacBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN New Dehli, India. Jeff Weise, teen slayer of ten, including himself, at the Red Lake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by some doc. How did the consultation go? "Here Jeff, take these, they may help you get over life's little problems, like the fact that when you were 8 your dad committed suicide and when you were 10 your cousin was killed in a car wreck that left your mom with partial paralysis and an injured brain. And let's face it, Jeff, most likely you'll never get off the res. You're here for the rest of your life." Cut to a shot of the doc holding up a Prozac bottle, like the kindly fellow in the white coat and mirrored headband in 1950s Lucky Strike ads, telling us that Luckies were a fine way to soothe a raspy throat. The minute the high command at Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, saw those news stories about Weise you can bet they went into crisis mode, and only began to relax when Weise's websurfs of neo-Nazi sites took over the headlines. Hitler trumps Prozac every time, particularly if it's an Injun teen ranting about racial purity. How many times, amid the carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at Louisville, Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine, including himself. You'll find many such stories in the past fifteen years. By now the Lilly defense formula is pretty standardized:self-righteous handouts about the company's costly research and rigorous screening, crowned by the imprimatur of that watchdog for the public interest, the FDA. And of course there's the bogus comfort of numbers; if Lilly's pill factory had a big sign like MacDonald's, it could boast Prozac: Billions Served. Each burst in the sewage pipe brings a new challenge to Lilly's sales force, which has had some heavy hitters down the years, including George Herbert Walker Bush (onetime member of the Lilly board of directors); former Enron CEO Ken Lay (onetime member of the board); George W. Bush's former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitch Daniels (a former senior vice president); George W. Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council member Sidney Taurel (a Lilly CEO); or the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a recipient of Lilly funding). At the turn of this year there was a five-alarm incident when the British Medical Journal went back to the 1994 Wesbecker suit against Lilly, reminding the world that the company had been involved in some shifty footwork involving a back-door payoff to the plaintiffs in a deal that successfully excluded from Judge John Potter's courtroom the regulatory case history of Oraflex, a highly compromised Lilly product, which displayed the company's supposed disclosures to the FDA in an unpleasing light. Lilly rose to the challenge, successfully persuading gullible journalists that the real story concerned a lonely freelancer writing for BMJ and not a powerful pharmaceutical company with a huge advertising budget. The press dutifully shifted its focus from Lilly's outrageous efforts to suppress evidence to the narrow question of whether a piece of evidence had really been in the public record in the years since 1997, when Judge Potter changed his verdict to "dismissed as settled with prejudice," very far from the victory Lilly had been claiming. That's the trouble with time, as Paul Krassner joked about Waldheimer's Disease, which is when you get old and forget you were a Nazi. But it's never too late to review the origins of the Depression Industry in the late 1980s, and the saga of what happened after three Lilly researchers concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened fluoxetine hydrochloride, later known to the world as Prozac. Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and I investigated the selling of depression and Prozac in the mid-1990s, we found that clinical trials excluded suicidal patients, children and the elderlyoalthough once FDA approval was granted, the drug could be prescribed for anyone. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known psychiatrist who analyzed the FDA's approval of Prozac, it was based, ultimately, on three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some symptoms of depression more effectively than a placebo, and in the face of nine studies indicating no positive effect. Only sixty- three patients were on fluoxetine (fluoexetine hydrochloride was branded as Prozac in the mid 70s) for a period of more than two years. By 1988 the National Institute of Mental Health had not only put the government stamp of approval on corporate-funded depression research but had created a mechanism whereby government money and personnel could be employed to stimulate demand for corporate products. Psychiatrists--a breed whose adepts, so stated a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1980, commit suicide at twice the national rate--have been central to the entire enterprise. The process linking their sorcery to the corporate bottom line has a robust simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly's research bench and headed for the mass production line psychiatrists labored to formulate a multitude of bogus pathologies to be installed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose chief editor in the 1980s was Robert Spitzer MD, an orgone box veteran and adept copywriter skilled at minting new ailments for late twentieth-century America and sanctioning treatment, medication, state funding for the requisite pills (no expensive consultative therapy) and reimbursement by insurance companies. When detailed research showed likely linkage of Prozac to violent acts. Lilly-liveried psychiatrists were there to douse the flames of doubt. In 1991 the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee met to decide whether Prozac should carry a warning label about links to suicide. Five out of the ten panel members (eight of whom were shrinks) had active financial interests in the drugs the committee was investigating, and all voted against requiring a warning, their obvious conflicts duly sanitized by the toothless FDA. Other shrinks in the hire of the drug companies urged ever wider application of Prozac to remedy social angst, inclcluding plans for compulsory Prozac-dosing of youngsters. In 2000, when hundreds of farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh were committing suicide because of neoliberal policies that had destroyed their livelihoods, the state government announced it was sending out a team of shrinks to determine why the farmers were depressed. The implication was that these people were mentally unstable. But in India credulity about the causes of depression is not so far advanced. The plan provoked a storm of ridicule, and in the elections that followed the Andhra Pradesh government, darling of Western neoliberals, was duly trounced. No such happy chance in the United States, where government is in the pay of drug companies and prescriptions for antidepressants have long since taken over from political manifestos that would cure depression by collective social action. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly when the Senate wiped out Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy statutes, fostering family violence, heightened crime and a vast new potential market for Prozac and kindred potions at the stroke of a pen. (A shorter version of this
column originally ran in the issue of The Nation that went to
press on Wednesday of this week.)
|
