Word: drugged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when he was a contributing writer for Penthouse. One of Null's earliest stories was a blistering investigative piece called "The Great Cancer Fraud," in which he and a co-author accused the medical community of suppressing alternative cancer treatments in order to generate income for itself and the drug industry. Null's language was incendiary--condemning "the medical establishment's solid-gold cancer train"--but the magazine nonetheless ran the piece...
...brand-new drug can be like a license to print money. It certainly worked that way for Eli Lilly. When the company launched the antidepressant Prozac in 1987, nobody else had anything quite like it, and Lilly cleaned up. But then other pharmaceutical firms rushed in with their own versions, including Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and the recently newsworthy Luvox, found in the blood of Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris. The competition has already eaten into Lilly's market share, and things can only go downhill from here...
That's true, if you're talking about Prozac simply as an antidepressant. But if a drug turns out to be good for something new, that presents a fresh marketing opportunity. And while the search for new ills to conquer is part of any drug's life cycle, the scramble is especially furious with mood drugs like Prozac and its kin. Prozac has been approved for bulimia and obsessive-compulsive disorder in addition to depression, while Zoloft can be used for OCD, and Paxil for both OCD and panic disorder...
...only by educated trial and error, not from reading drug labels, that doctors learned how broadly useful SSRIs like Prozac, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa can be in treating not just depression, OCD, bulimia and panic disorder but also migraines, anxiety disorders, attention-deficit disorder, kleptomania, post-traumatic stress and even premenstrual mood swings. (Despite earlier claims about Prozac and attempts to link Luvox to the Colorado school shootings, there is no evidence that SSRIs themselves cause violent behavior.) Although the FDA hasn't approved all these uses for all the drugs, doctors are free to prescribe them for anything they...
Still, once a firm finds a new use for a drug, it makes sense to get formal approval. That's the only way the company can legally start pushing the treatment in ads and in marketing pitches to physicians. Paxil may be the latest example of an SSRI expanding its franchise. But it's not the first, and it won't be the last...