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Chemical Warfare: The US Military's Pill Addiction
To fight our insane wars, we’re wrecking our soldiers’ ability to live with themselves and function in society, then regulating what’s left of them with chemicals, which often make things immeasurably worse.
The modern Army psychiatrist’s deployment kit is likely to include nine kinds of antidepressants, benzodiazepines for anxiety, four antipsychotics, two kinds of sleep aids, and drugs for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a 2007 review in the journal Military Medicine.
In the pursuit of order, could we possibly be creating more chaos, not simply externally — in the shattered countries we’re leaving in our wake — but internally, in the minds of those soldiers?
The Los Angeles Times noted that Air Force pilot Patrick Burke was recently acquitted in a court-marital hearing on charges of auto theft, drunk driving and two counts of assault — due to “polysubstance-induced delirium.” This was, the Times explained, a turning point: the first official acknowledgement, by military psychiatrists and a court-martial judge, that the drugs that have become a routine part of military service — in Burke’s case, the prescribed amphetamine Dexedrine (“go pills”) — can contribute to temporary insanity.
Better living through chemistry!
The chemical fix pervades the whole culture, of course, and while drugs can produce astounding results, they are demonically seductive and always have a down side. And nowhere, it seems, is their misuse more dramatic than in the modern military.
“After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general,” Kim Murphy writes in the Times article. “Nearly 8 percent of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6 percent is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005.”
Murphy quotes psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written on the correlation between drug use and violence: “Prior to the Iraq war, soldiers could not go into combat on psychiatric drugs, period. Not very long ago . . . you couldn’t even go into the armed services if you used any of these drugs, in particular stimulants.”
“Nearly 8 percent of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6 percent is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005.”
Now he’s hearing from soldiers who tell him “the psychiatrist won’t approve their deployment unless they take psychiatric drugs.”
Uh, this sounds like addiction, and not on the part of the soldiers. The military itself is addicted to . . . well, as Murphy explains, “the modern Army psychiatrist’s deployment kit is likely to include nine kinds ofantidepressants, benzodiazepines for anxiety, four antipsychotics, two kinds of sleep aids, and drugs for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a 2007 review in the journal Military Medicine.”
And the attorneys for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the alleged lone killer of 17 Afghans last month, have asked for a list of all the medications he was taking. There’s a great deal of speculation about whether he was on one drug in particular, the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, which has been linked to bizarre and violent behavior and induces what’s known in the ranks as “mefloquine rage.”
All of which makes me think of the out-of-control use of chemicals in global agribusiness, in its for-profit zeal to turn the planet’s arable land into endless acres of monoculture, in utter defiance of, and war against, the diversity of nature. This is our war against “pests” and “weeds,” and, like our war against “evil,” a.k.a., terrorism, or whatever, and our determination to impose an economic and political monoculture on the whole planet, we’re not simply losing, we’re destroying ourselves.
“‘Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,’ a Dow official said last month. Translation? Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues created by . . . technology introduced 15 years ago,” Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote recently in Yale Environment 360 (reprinted at Common Dreams).
“Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity,” he went on, “the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the USDA seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an anti-biological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it, and quickly.”
This is the domination mindset: As we seek dominion over nature and dominion over the nations of the world, we whack at our perceived enemies with an endless barrage of same old, same old, in increasingly lethal dosages. And when the war backs up into our psyches, we turn the chemical barrage on our own minds, on our own souls.
What will it take to transform institutionalized rage and fear into something that doesn’t emanate from the reptile brain? How do we put love into collective motion? Until we do, the world will keep looking more and more like a sci-fi techno-dystopia.
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11 Comments so far
Show AllMr Koehler, thanks for getting to the heart of the matter - the elite ego's domination agenda against the people and nature.
When a country's military is used to allegedly support the American way of life, is it any surprise that our modern day corporate trained troops are encouraged to embrace everything that is corporate? Troops, when they travel the world, seldom leave their base because they're suppose to be happy gorging themselves on Taco Bell, Burger King and KFC. Or why would you leave your base in Germany or Japan to go shopping when you can buy discounted Chinese junk at your local PX? Why buy illegal drugs off base when you can buy the top quality hallucinogenic drugs by Pfizer and Sandoz and get approval from your commanding officer?
At the same time troops re taught to be ready to kill without any qualms if ordered because the people they are killing are NOT Americans. Humanity is nothing more than part of the liberal conspiracy that wants you to think that all humans bleed, breathe, shit and care like we do. Therefore you are taught to love and obey the corporate version of America and damn the rest. After all, how effective would a fighting force be if they realized that the people they're killing are essential exactly the same as us?
It is no wonder that so many troops are depressed, confused and disillusioned. It is difficult being on the wrong side of righteousness yet pledging your dying allegiance to a cause you don't really understand.
Anyone who has ever visited a base can instantly recognizes a warped corporate culture that infiltrates every aspect of base life. Whether they're being subjected to a 'hard sell' to buy an "American" car they can't afford (much less use!) or whether they're having to eat their dinner with a dozen TV sets around them blaring FOX News, sanity is conspicuously absent during their entire tour. Soldiers are after all 'consumers' fighting for the right to global consumerism and damn the environment, socialist pinko commies, global warming and anything else that gets in the way!
SC, whether you like it or not, you are one of my favorite posters
Soldiers are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy -- Hank Kissinger
Mr. Koehler, you connect important dots and ask the right questions, like this one:
"What will it take to transform institutionalized rage and fear into something that doesn’t emanate from the reptile brain? How do we put love into collective motion?"
The answer goes back to Indigenous roots and earlier Partnership-based cultural models. VERY few academics grant credence to the witness of what was, especially when it contradicts their models based on, as you noted, domination over nature, etc.
One key book that exposes how our earlier ancestors lived is "The Chalice and the Blade," by Riane Eisler. Its thesis is inordinately promising.
Warrior cultures that focus on dominating everything and everyone, inclusive of nature, do not want the knowledge of other models to be known. After all, it's much easier to push a deadly ethos if you can convince the vast majority that it reflecfts an unchanging human nature, one that has always been thus and so. That is NOT the truth of our origins, nor is it indicative of the spectrum of human possibility. And that's why I speak about this deceit often in this forum...
No change can begin without a shift in consciousness; or as Einstein put it: "You cannot solve a problem (the dominator mentality) from the level of consciousness that created it."
God forbid a man would ask a woman for advice... or a higher understanding. That's why so few men in this forum have ever read a book based on women's perspectives, women's intuition/mystical knowing, or a feminist version of earlier human societal arrangements.
I had some neighbors, two women who lived together and were ardent feminists. I picked up one of the books on the table. The first line of the first chapter was, quote, "All men are rapists."
I don't remember the author or title. Anyway, I put it down. I'm a man, but not a rapist.
So I didn't ever read any feminist books after that. No doubt I missed a lot of good literature, but that is why. Now that I write this though I think,k maybe it is time I give the genre another chance. It was just a bad first impression.
75% of men watch porn. 85% of porn includes violence against women including hair pulling, slapping and fluids on faces. Gonzo, rape porn, is some of today's most popular entertainment for men.
I don't hear the majority of men who view gonzo porn understanding that they are watching actual rape in many cases, unwilling slaved women and children. The life span of a filmed prostitute (paid for sex acts with a camera in the room, big difference) is rather brief and there are multiple surgeries for torn orifices for all.
Rape humor is also open between men, and I just heard a rape innuendo in a public store this week, which is not fun whenn I was the only women and there were four men "joking" about my comment deserving "another slap on the other cheek".
Attitudes towards women have been documented to slide when juvenile males watch violent porn. And, research also indicates that "if not caught, a significant number of rape porn viewers would also commit rape."
We live in a RAPE culture. I'm glad you can look at the first line of a book ONCE in your life and then poof ignore it.
Women, as a class of human beings, are being treated like second class citizens and harmed even WORSE than animals ("no animals were harmed in the making of this movie" apparently doesn't hold for human females) for the entertainment of males.
Gatekeepers maintain the tacit approval of violence against women by ignoring rape culture, tolerating rape jokes, not confronting the depiction of women in media, supporting the violence against women by watching porn (that drives the market for illegally slaved women and children to meet the need to do those acts on real people after viewing porn), and that's how almost all, but not all, men invisibly support the rape culture.
This article is about anti-psychotic drugs for soldiers in the military. I am diametrically opposed to Big Pharma profit makers that treat "phony" diagnoses without any evidence of their actual existence. Many of these anti-psychotics are in the bloodstream of mass murderers annd other violent criminals, but goes unreported.
This article is about the military, and there also is an absolute mockery of women as second class citizens by their rate of rape in our military while they are serving their country. NPR has been doing a series on the rape of women in the military.
Not all men are rapists, but as a woman, I have to live my life every day as if they are. Yes, I've been raped by a stranger. Have you?
SURVIVOR: Thank you for laying out the case I've sought to make in a variety of ways on numerous occasions. Although this forum has a number of well-educated males, the vast majority could care LESS about this subject. I've been attacked with venom for stating the truth, and I can think of maybe 7 males (on different occasions) who came to my aid. The rest are indifferent, or for fear of being bullied, remain silent.
Not only is the violence against women damaging to women, it means men must distance themselves from "feminine" things like caring. Unbeknownst to them, this tactic cripples their own sentience. Note how France, as a nation, was feminized in a most derogatory way for advising Bush, the lesser, to steer away from a direct attack on Iraq. When men are not allowed to feel, they cry bullets. (That, too, has been documented by an author whose last name is Pollack.) The net result of denying feelings as an adjunct of the disowned feminine, is a nation incapable of empathy or taking in the nature of its sickening use of redundant force/violence on other lands. And that, in my view, is precisely the motive behind demonizing all things feminine. For a nation that centers its profits on war, cannot have a citizenry that FEELS what war brings to sentient life in the way of unspeakable pain and senseless destruction.
Violence itself is also sexualized by our twisted Mars rules culture. The case has been made by Robert Koehler and Robert Jensen (as documented in his, not for the faint-hearted book, "Getting Off"). Photos smuggled out of some of the torture/prison camps suggest sexual humiliation. Naomi Wolf has linked this with the new Strip Search law.
All of these trends hold one thing in common: they make human life cheap.
To the poster who used pride to cling to his macho ignorance, the books I recommended do not say that all men are rapists. They speak about the net loss to any society (or civilization) when it can only imagine the Deity in masculine terms; and when for centuries, ONLY males got to determine what constituted religion... a legacy that found its way into law, government, and even academe given the influence The Bible has had on Western civilization (or its attempt, as Gandhi noted).
Although racism is discussed in many forums, sexism is still pushed under the rug as if it's been dealt with, or isn't all that important after all. That's the subtext. Some males in this forum suggest the very concept disrupts the Left. Others argue from the libertarian angle that pornography should be accepted on the basis of the Individual's Right and Preference. Still others speak of violence directed AT males, as if that's what the statistics portray. (This diversion is utilized to speak of Male on Male rape, when it ultimately reinforces the point about the disproportionate emphasis on domination, itself, in male-centered cultures that treat women as 2nd class citizens.)
There are very serious analogies between Christian fundamentalism and "all hell breaking loose" for women. Most of the women burned as witches were women who sought self-determination and wished to worship Source in their own (non-authoritarian) ways. The punishment for that independence was a cruel death.
Is this subject ever spoken about? I see the SAME fear and repugnance of the independent, spiritually sovereign (that is, one not affiliated with any patriarchal religious institution) woman at work today! Look at Right Wing Christians' attempts at withholding not only abortion, but birth control! Or their attempts to destroy Family Planning efforts in impoverished 3rd world nations.
No demographic (apart from "Muslim would be terroriststs") warrants as much fear and loathing as the independent female who does not bow in homage to the patriarchal order. The fear is there because if and when enough women gain sovereignty over their own lives, the entire patriarchal paradigm (which depends on them for everything from a class to demonize, to unpaid slave labor, to sexual favors, often on demand) would collapse.
The denigration of women, along with the Divine Feminine, is precisely the strategy that's allowed a martial form of maleness, what I term Mars rules, to gain such dominance. And it is this anti-life ethos that makes war its centerpiece... if more persons valued life through the female Essence that acts as its midwife, the worship of warfare and the way it now cannibalizes the vast majority of our nation's budget COULD NOT be tolerated, nor would it exist.
That's why I work to change consciousness. And my stating these things is likely why I've had at least 20 people, some who work together, wage regular attacks on me and my professional reputation, to discredit these ideas freely shared with this forum. It takes a lot of courage to reveal unpopular Truths, especially in this phase of uber: deception. Thank you for demonstrating that courage, along with much wisdom.
I've always thought that if we really intended to win, all we have to do is bomb them with LSD. On the other hand, if we bombed ourselves with it first, we would not have to bomb them at all.
Psychiatric drug use in the U.S. is an epidemic. The whole antidepressant business is a racket. None of the psychiatric drugs do anything whatsoever to heal any disease. All they do is mask symptoms and produce other symptoms.
The benzodiazepines are incredibly hard to quit using. People who run out of their Xanax or their Klonopin account for the largest percentage of drug-related emergency room visits in the United States. Withdrawal is incredibly horrible and can result in convulsions and complete loss of mental stability and several years of difficulty following the long period of detox that is necessary for safety and sanity.
The psych drugs are just ugly bad news drugs on the whole, in my opinion, based on a lot of experience with them.
Some of the commonly-prescribed psychiatric drugs can be, even when used as prescribed and not abused, nearly as destructive over time as any of the illegal drugs, including heroin, meth, and cocaine.
The pharma industry is not attached to only making medicines to help people get well. If there is a profit in it, pharma companies are just as happy to make drugs that keep people sick.
There is lots of evidence that the atypical antipsychotics and the antidepressants not only do not cure any condition, or even relieve it in most cases, but create new troubling medical conditions of real physical and mental illness, as well as dependence.
These are really symptoms or results of poisoning, and are, eventually, relieved in the complete absence of the drugs. They are never relieved as long as the drugs are still being taken.
To put it in a simpler way, these drugs are worse than most people know. The side effects and the aftereffects of these drugs are far more problematic than the public has been led to believe, and the efficacy of these drugs is questionable, at best, and far less than the public has been led to believe.
Finally, the dangers of these drugs are greater than is generally understood, to our peril, and this is because the dangers of these drugs have not been fully revealed to the public by the manufacturers, doctors, and pharmacies.
-a grateful survivor of psychiatric prescriptions.
Good article and comments. I often marvel at the "war on drugs" mentality of the US "leaders" (eg now at the conference in Colombia where many south american nations want a change in policy on illegal drugs because of the terrible results) while prescription drugs prosper and Big Pharma benefits.