In two dozen words, the US government thereby acknowledged the danger posed by psychotropic drugs to the health, safety and sanity of Americans, a position the Church of Scientology has maintained for over half a century.
For decades, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a nonprofit mental health watchdog established by the Church of Scientology in 1969, has been sounding the alarm on the unholy marriage between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, which has spawned myriad poisons marketed as “medicines” for ills ranging from depression to psychosis.
It shouldn’t take much work for the government commission to find the evidence it needs.
Thanks to CCHR’s efforts, as well as that of a few courageous researchers, the risks inherent in psychotropic drugs are no longer a secret. As but one example, each year, 50 percent more people in the US die from psychotropic drugs than heroin, according to University of British Columbia’s Dr. Thomas Kerr, a professor of medicine.
The list of well-documented side effects—many of them deadly—from antidepressants and antipsychotics is longer than the First Amendment, the Gettysburg Address and the Lord’s Prayer combined.
There is no room in this article to list them all, but a handful will do. Antidepressants: nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, emotional numbness, irritability, akathisia (uncontrollable limb and body movements), anxiety, chills, hypertension, impotence and suicide.
Antipsychotics: sedation, prolonged muscle spasms, severe restlessness, shakiness, heart problems, depletion of white blood cells (potentially fatal), seizures, hostility, anxiety, decreased blood flow to the brain (which can lead to loss of consciousness) and coma.
The prevalence (the US government’s word) of psychotropic drugs in America makes the recent pandemic mild by comparison. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 16.5 percent of American adults took psychotropics in 2020. That’s approximately 42.6 million people, more than the entire population of California.
Imagine every man, woman and child in the Golden State in constant danger of succumbing to muscle spasms, hostility, heart problems, seizure, loss of consciousness and suicide, and you’ll have a rough idea of the scope of the plague.
And the number grows each year, especially among youth.
The cost to our nation in ruined lives—all to maintain the $100 billion-per-year psychiatric and psychopharmaceutical colossi—is incalculable.
The Church of Scientology and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights will be carefully monitoring the new commission’s work, its findings and its recommendations. If the study is properly and honestly done, the results will be entirely consistent with what the Church and CCHR have been saying for decades.
It shouldn’t take much work for the government commission to find the evidence it needs. They could simply read Dr. Joanna Moncrieff’s just-published book, Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth, in which she writes: “People have been profoundly misled about antidepressants. Not only have they never been shown to rectify a chemical imbalance or any other abnormality, but … they actually interfere with the normal state of the brain, just like alcohol and other mind-altering drugs. This is how they can produce potentially devastating side effects—from rare suicidal thoughts to severe sexual problems.”
Or they could talk to Lady Gabriella Kingston, whose beloved husband, an “exceptional man who lit up the lives of all who knew him,” shot himself as a result of what the coroner described as “adverse effects of [psychotropic drugs] he had recently been prescribed.”
They could look into the ongoing review by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)—a government bureau roughly corresponding to the FDA in the US—of 30 antidepressants, “as figures point to hundreds of deaths linked to suicide and self-harm among people prescribed these drugs,” according to The Independent.
Or they could watch CCHR’s documentary, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.
Certain other countries have already levied partial or complete restrictions on some psychotropic drugs, so America wouldn’t be the first. But it would be the biggest, wielding the most influence.
It has been said that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
The reverse is also true. When America rids itself of an affliction, the rest of the world begins to heal, too.
