Why Prozac and Ritalin Are Slow-Moving Suicide for Humankind
The excellent entry a few days ago, about Adult ADD, has taken hold in my mind. My children are of an age that results in significant numbers of their peers being on powerful prescription drugs that are essentially addictive amphetamines and tranquilizers. This addictive epidemic occurs simultaneously as our taxes pay for a futile and brutal and stupid “War on Drugs” that more and more nations, where rational discourse has more cachet than here, are rejecting as policy or practice. Canada will begin offering marijuana over the counter in a few months, for example.
This post will not be a policy analysis piece. Free is generally not enough pay to dot the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’ in the fashion that such work requires. I will get around to that, since I have access to the data and analysis to make such points, at the least to my own satisfaction, and I believe that such perspectives are important to present. In any case, folks much more knowledgeable than I am have developed powerful arguments against the various vicious experiments in social control and sucker-shakedown that the mass prescription of SSRI’s like Prozac and amphetamine-analogs like Ritalin amount to.
Just a couple of points seem worth noting, before I offer readers the synopsis for a screenplay I’ve written, “Lu-Lu”, that examines these issues in a plausibly entertaining and otherwise engaging manner. The first is that “normality” is way overrated. Not only is “variety the spice of life,” but variety is a biological mechanism for making survival possible in future circumstances that are difficult to predict. Thus, if we chemically or genetically manage to reduce the marvelous diversity of the six and a half billion cousins among us, we are setting ourselves up for horrifying destruction in the event that some of the personality traits and general characteristics so modified out of existence turn out to be just the thing that nature needed to keep us going.
Second, the management reasons for prescribing these drugs have nothing to do with health and everything to do with lowering costs and increasing profits. Overstuffed classrooms and meaningless matriculation are much cheaper, and easier to sell, if the lively youngsters haven’t the zip to rip the stupid parts of the day to pieces. Workers who don’t have the resources or support to deal with structurally intractable personal and family problems, or who just are a bit on the tidal side from PMS or other cyclical phenomena, needn’t ever again cost a penny in lost productivity. That such factors may balance poorly against the later social costs of the addictive decision process is a consequence about which the beneficiaries of current policies will not have to worry.
There’s plenty more, of course, from economics, politics, and history, as well as medicine and biology, to indict the current climate. These will all come out in the fullness of time. For today, the précis, posted below, of the film I have written may be worth a glance, and otherwise folks should let out all the stops in discussing the disaster-already-made that our current drug policies represent.
SYNOPSIS
for “Lu-Lu”
(working title)
TAG LINE: This is a story about a feisty, sexy, half crazy grandmother who wants to rescue her more than half crazy eight year old granddaughter from a lobotomy that the child’s mom insists, due to the daughter’s wildness, is necessary and therapeutic.
Civil warfare is the most brutal type of conflict, and family warfare is the worst sort of civil war. A vicious battle between a mother and daughter is at the heart of this tale. They are battling over the fate of the new generation, the daughter’s daughter. The gypsies who play a part in some of the dealings in this film have a saying. “A family feud is as ugly as a knife fight in the dark.” This is a film that illustrates this aphorism.
The story unfolds against the gorgeous backdrop of the Lookout Mountain area of Northwest Georgia and Northeast Alabama. Wild canyon country as stark and magnificent as the Himalayas comprises the countryside, while picturesque Summerville and nearby Rome, Georgia, provide interiors and small town scenes.
‘Bookends’, in the present day and shot in flashback, introduce and offer epilogue for the crazy mayhem at the heart of this movie. All the contemporary takes occur in the Alpine Winter of Little River Canyon. An older sister, the savvy and powerful fifty-year-old Lu-Ann, calls in an old promise from her younger sibling, Megan. Lu-Ann insists, with just a single flask of moonshine to warm their perambulations amidst the January flood of the overflowing Little River, that Megan listen to the recounting of the tale.
In flashback, Lu-Ann is ‘Lu-Lu,’ an eight year old hellion so bent on keeping her mother’s attention and love focused in her direction that she is nearly always on a rampage. Her mother, Ann, is a small town princess who thrives on parties and adulation. Ann desires nothing more than the chance to mount her throne and receive her court, without mortification at every turn from an out-of-control child. Her husband, Tom, is a generally decent but very passive fellow, who tries to keep his beautiful wife happy enough to continue being interested in basic necessities like sex and housekeeping. After continued instances of increasing unruliness, Lu-Lu gives a cataclysmic performance at a giant hoe-down, utterly ruining the gala for Ann and making the daughter’s behavior the universal topic of small-town gossip.
Ann demands some sort of intervention. A recently-arrived physician, in nearby Rome, Georgia, offers what seems to be a way out for the couple, when he suggests a new procedure to help with the young girl’s “fits.” The lobotomy he wants to perform actually occurred to several thousand children around the world, at least occasionally as a way of modifying wild behavior or ending a proclivity for wreaking havoc.
Lu-Lu’s grandmother, Louise, opposes this notion instantly. Ann sees her daughter as “just like” her mother, crazy and without normal standards. Inevitably, their differences on this issue erupt into a hateful grudge match. Louise’s conflict with Ann develops against the backdrop of longstanding tension between them. Ann blames her mother for her father’s death, years earlier. He took his own life when Louise had a torrid affair. In spite of this bit-ter and difficult history, Louise fights without quarter to stop the lobotomy.
Their fight ends up involving Louise’s current sweetheart, the much younger L.T. Daniels. He is the sheriff of the community and has a wife and children. His father-in-law is the local godfather and banker, who is a key figure in the local distribution of moonshine. This contraband activity is under tremendous pressure, due to the federal government’s efforts to collect taxes and regulate the commerce in alcohol. The production of corn whiskey takes place in the wild, and is the bailiwick of local gypsies. These outlaws have an unforgiving attitude toward anything that threatens to interfere with their business.
This distress explodes when Ann, in order to win in her struggle against her mother, leaks out information about Louise’s involvement with the sheriff, and the beleaguered man is assassinated so that he appears to have taken his own life. Ann also sics the mental health authorities on her mom. This is a dire threat, since Louise underwent forced electro-shock treatment and a months-long involuntary commitment as a result of her indiscretions years prior, the affair that resulted in the suicide of her husband.
Louise manages to overcome her own terror and the overwhelming sense of loss at her lover’s death, however. She eludes the police, the mental health gestapo, the gypsies, and the denizens of the local power elite, bringing about a gigantic, insane, climactic encounter with Ann, Tom, and Lu-Lu on the steps of the doctor’s office, as the family is ar-riving for the lobotomization. This imbroglio causes Ann to break down momentarily. Tom, for the first time in his marriage, takes a stand that he knows is not the one his wife desires. He refuses to relent, saving his daughter from the knife.
The result is that Lu-Lu lives to become Lu-Ann, able to tell the story to Megan in the present day. Lu-Ann conveys the tale in order to keep her nephew from a course of treatment with Ritalin and Prozac. She takes a stand to support this child in the same way that her grandmother Louise stood up for her forty odd years before. When the child and his father join the two sisters, overlooking the canyon waterfall’s majestic cascade, Lu-Ann offers her life and resources in service to him, to save him from this chemical lobotomization, the risks of which are not as obvious, but nonetheless are as real as, what nearly befell her.