DRUG INDUCED STUPIDITY

It's no wonder the US continues to slide into chaos and dysfunction given the number of Americans who drug themselves just to be able to cope with their lives. This approach to life is a fools quest and self defeating since the more we become detached from reality the less we are able to cope with it.

A survey of prescription drug trends among 2.5 million insured Americans from 2001 to 2010, found that one in five adults is currently taking at least one psychiatric drug. Americans spent more than $16 billion on antipsychotics, $11 billion on antidepressants and $7 billion on drugs to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2010. And according to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control, 87 percent of people who visit a psychiatrist’s office leave with a prescription.


To make matters worse we are now projecting our dysfunctional behaviors on to our pets and the drug manufacturers are jumping on it like a dog on a bone.


Do our pets need Prozac? Are we making them feel better, or ourselves?


The U.S. market for pet pharmaceuticals is large and growing, from $6.68 billion in 2011 to a projected $9.25 billion by 2015. Zoetis Inc. is the world’s largest maker of animal medicines. Once a subsidiary of Pfizer, it went public in January of 2013 and raised $2.2 billion in its initial public offering, the largest IPO deal for an American company since Facebook. Elanco, a pet pharma company owned by Eli Lilly, has $1.4 billion in annual sales and is the fourth-largest animal health business in the world. Growth in Lilly’s animal division recently outpaced its general pharmaceutical division for humans. Yearly sales of Pfizer’s animal pharmaceuticals are worth roughly $3.9 billion, with companion animal meds representing 40 percent of the total.


There are those that benefit from this;

Why Does the Right Embrace Ignorance as a Virtue?

This mentality, in its modern form, can be traced back to the Bush White House. In 2004, Ron Suskind of the New York Times interviewed an unnamed Bush official who famously pooh-poohed what he believed to be the shortcomings of journalists who insist that the truth matters more than fantasy:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."