Pharma Phraud

Today's pharmaceutical industry: its advertising, promotion, and heavily subsidized drug research. Its general ubiquity in American society.

Imagine this:
You are living in wonderful old 1950s America, growing up on a farm in Iowa and your father is a WWII vet, whatever. Most of the food you eat is locally produced, if not on your own farm. If someone told you that 50 years from now literally millions of children would be on powerful psychoactive medications, you might wonder if we hadn't all been through a nuclear winter at some point, and needed special medicine to survive the fallout!

Here's just one example: According to one source, about four million kids are on Ritalin today, compared to one million in 1990. Use has doubled every four to seven years since 1970. More than 90 percent of Ritalin use is by Americans, and mostly children. So not only has an exorbitant, rapidly accelerating number of children been prescribed medication for various supposed mental health issues, much of what is prescribed is a known addictive drug - amphetamine (Ritalin, i.e, methylphenidate)

Considering the parallel epidemic of methamphetamine abuse in America, we ought to be doubly cautious, right? After all, Ritalin is a close cousin of meth. Wrong. In fact, methamphetamine is sometimes prescribed for the same condition - ADD or ADHD - under the trade name Desyrel.
I believe it is a useful exercise to imagine oneself as that Iowa farmer citizen of yesteryear - and to apply the hypothetical scenario that this citizen can see into the future. I think we would find that such a poor soul would think they had died and gone to hell!