"Like Kennedy, I recovered from heroin addiction," begins a guest essay in the New York Times this week by Maia Szalavitz. "When I became profoundly depressed several years into abstinence, antidepressants revolutionized my recovery." The Kennedy she is referring to is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK, Jr.), nominated to head the US Department of Health & Human Services.
It is hard to know which is more offensive in Szalavitz' oped: her paean to Prozac, other psych drugs and weepy victimhood--"For the first time, I was able to feel comfortable socially, without the harms of addictive drugs," she snivels--or her brazen shilling for Big Pharma.
Of course, Szalavitz' screed against abstinence-based, drug-free recovery (and against RFK, Jr.) is no surprise: Big Pharma has tried to monetize such programs for years by funding rehab programs and finessing diagnoses to include their drugs. (more on this later). Why should drugmakers and Wall Street not be in on the addiction gravy train?
Addiction Expert? Really?
As an "addiction expert" Szalavitz is woefully ignorant. Does she not realize that most if not all mass shooters are on the happy pills she extols and that psych-drug related suicides are rife including in the military? (underreported by a media funded by drug ads)
Does she not realize the same drugmakers who hooked people on opioids also profit from opioid "recovery" drugs--unabashedly playing both sides of the street?
Does she not realize the putative addiction "benefits" of GLP-1 agonists that she exalts all derive from "research" funded by drugs' makers, from their clinical trials or from the doctors they fund? Once upon a time, these claims would have been called conflicts of interest.
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