Essay on "Paxil Tying Drug Readings"

Essay 3 pages (916 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Such symptoms may very well include a recurrence (oftentimes in a considerably greater degree than that which the medication was initially used for) of anxiety, as well as other commonly symptoms such as lightheadedness and difficulty with sleeping.

Another fairly intriguing aspect about Paxil is that due to the fact that it is a prescribed medication, which is disseminated to patients for such a wide variety of reasons, there is a considerable market for it. The revenues produced by the sale of this narcotic may also be factors in its panacea like perception for several clinical conditions. Author Richard DeGrandpre explores this notion in his book The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture.

The competitiveness of the drug market and the fact that one or two successfully approved and marketed compounds could raise a company from rags to riches almost overnight made for an increasingly aggressive and reckless industry. The medicopharmaceutical industrial complex… benefited from differential prohibition… in the demonization of certain natural substances-marijuana...-…set…apart from the "ethical" pharmaceutical compounds, even if the latter had equal or greater toxicity (241).

Furthermore, the widespread dissemination of Paxil, which is more ethically acceptable than marijuana, despite the fact that marijuana can alleviate many of the same symptoms (albeit it in lesser severity) leads to a system of classification that in and of itself may be as disturbing or as a problematic for a patient as the actual clinical issue he or she suffers from. By stratifying people into many of the classifications that Paxil is prescribed for, the medical industry can thrive on sales, and people eventually become dependent on this substance. The proclivity to categorize people for the sake of medical exploitation is referenced in the following quotation from Ian Hacking's "Making Up People." "Statistical analysis of classes of people is a fundamental engine. We constantly try to medicalise: doctors tried to medicalise suicide as early as the 1830s. The brains of suicides were dissected to find the hidden cause" (Hacking).

In this quotation, the author is using the example of the tendency to "medicalise" suicide to describe the phenomenon in which science and medicine attempts to find inherent reasons for certain categories of people -- so that, ultimately, they can produce some remedy that can produce capital gain. Paxil, for all of its perceived beneficence, may very well be one of those remedies.

Bibliography

Becker, Howard S. "Becoming a Marihuana User." The American Journal of Sociology. 59, no.3 (1953): 235-242.

DeGrandpre, Richard. The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Hacking, Ian. "Making Up People." The London… READ MORE

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