Michael Jackson’s message from the grave

by Charlene Smith (c)

It was an accident, just a stupid accident, but when sparks from a fireworks display set fire to 25-year-old Michael Jackson’s hair in 1984, each carried a message about what would cause his death exactly 25 years later.

Only eight years before, then Merck chief executive officer Henry Gadsen was famously quoted in a 1976 Fortune article as saying: “I want to sell drugs to everyone. I want to sell drugs to healthy people. I want drugs to sell like chewing gum.”

Gadsen died in 1980, but by then his dream was coming true. Around the time that he made his statement, some scientists at Sloan Kettering cancer research centre were suggesting opioid painkillers might be effective for more than just terminal cancer pain. This saw a rapid escalation in doctors and dentists prescribing opioids for problems as insignificant as a pulled tooth or stubbed toe.

And another bonus came along for pharmaceutical industries that had quietly paved the way for it. In the year Gadsen died the American Psychiatrists Association, which had long been plagued by controversy around the lack of science to back diagnoses fought back, not with science but with public relations and huge drug company grants.

They came out with DSM-III – the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - which enumerates psychiatric disorders. This manual saw these disorders leap from 182 disorders in 1968 to 265 by 1980. At the time homosexuality was labeled as a ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ but in 1980, while continuing to see homosexuality as a disorder, DSM labeled it as ‘ego-dystonic homosexuality.’ It would take another seven years for homosexuality to be removed as a disorder along with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (the perfectly normal premenstrual tension women experience each month – this has recently again become a disorder by those who seek to create pills and profit from the normal) and masochistic personality disorder became totally normal.

Today psychiatry would have us believe that shyness is a disorder, so is grief, they say, and too those who jiggle their legs when impatient are not quite normal.  In the award-winning Broadway play, Next to Normal, Diana Goodman is pushed into 16 years of prescription drug addiction after the death of her eight-month-old son. In the play she recounts how a psychiatrist told her that any grief that lasts longer than four months is a disorder.

2.4 million schizophrenics in the U.S.

In his award-winning book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, Robert Whitaker tells us that “Drug-induced chronicity has contributed to the rise in the number of disabled mentally ill. In 1955, there were 267,000 people with schizophrenia in state and county mental hospitals, or one in every 617 Americans. Today, there are an estimated 2.4 million people … ill with schizophrenia (or some other psychotic disorder), a disability rate of one in every 125 Americans.” Can it be true that so many people in the most prosperous nation on earth are so seriously disabled, and if so, why?

But let’s get back to Michael Jackson and his accident in 1984, it was the year that the Guinness Book of Records said that his new album, Thriller, was the top-selling album of all time. Jackson’s accident was the sort that has seen millions just like him become addicted to prescription drugs either because their doctors were ignorant of the side-effects of the drugs, or because some pharmaceutical companies and doctors knowingly trapped patients into a process they knew would lead to addiction and high profits. 

A badly burned Jackson began the first of a series of surgeries to correct the burns damage, and along the way threw in cosmetic surgery too. He was put onto painkillers to help reduce the pain from the burns and the surgeries, and so began an addictive spiral, aided by greedy doctors.

While researching prescription drug addiction in West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the U.S.A., I learned of a woman doctor who had lines of patients waiting outside her doors. She would practice until 3a.m. dispensing opioid painkillers by the thousands, and by the time the Drug Enforcement Administration got onto her tail; she jetted off to the island she had bought in the Caribbean.  Recently, as another example, 71-year-old Dr. Tyron Reece of Los Angeles was arrested because he wrote prescriptions in 2010 for some 920,000 hydrocodone pills [Vicodin or Lortab], and according to arresting officers was allegedly involved in smuggling opioids to Mexico (the trade is usually in the opposite direction).

 Dr. Irwin Dhalla of the University of Toronto recently wrote that: “The risk of addiction for patients who are being treated for chronic pain for several months or longer is 35 percent… Addiction is a much bigger problem than physicians think it is." 

Indeed, Dr. David Kloth, a leading member of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians told me in an interview for my upcoming book, America the Overmedicated, that 80 percent to 90 percent of those administering pain medications, including physicians, lacked appropriate qualifications.  Experts in the federal administration agree. That is a frightening realization especially when you realize that the top-selling drug, by far, in the United States is hydrocodone, the parent of Vicodin and similar drugs.

Ironically, however, opioid painkillers are easy to get off, you can stop them immediately and although you will go through withdrawal hell of stomach cramps, vomiting and three days to a week of feeling seriously ill, it is not as dangerous as psychiatric drugs which you cannot stop suddenly without endangering your life.

Addiction and profit

Between 1952 when DSM first came out to 2000 the number of psychiatric disorders soared 200%, and continue to increase in line with pharmaceutical company profits which have increased six times globally since 1999. That was also the year that the Federal Drug Administration allowed prescription drug advertising on television and radio, something only New Zealand also allows.  And in those eleven years since prescription drug advertising was allowed on television and radio stations addiction rates have soared in the United States. In April, the White House called prescription drug addiction an “epidemic” but ironically, it is not an epidemic it is marshaling significant resources to combat.