One of the biggest issues we all face is the way our behavior and emotions are manipulated by public relations experts, usually against our best interests. The Pharmaceutical Industry is one of the most powerful special interests in the U.S. and the world -- something many of us are realizing is that this power is often not a reflection of any actual benefits their products provide us.
Admittedly, some of their standardized products do save lives, especially in surgery and other trauma care. They're good at this and needed, but there are many other areas where they are foisting products on us (usually from childhood, under threat that we will be denied the public education our parents are forced to pay for) -- products for conditions that are largely caused by nutritional deficiencies and/or our terrible diet of processed foods.
But there's BIG money to be had in letting us get sick (from our diet, toxins in our environment, and simple nutrient deficiencies) and then selling us a pharmaceutical product that our FDA lets them claim is somewhat effective at addressing problems like ADHD, even though the drugs don't provide any of the nutrients our children are lacking, nor do they correct a bad diet. (There's little money in that, but there's a lot of money from selling children amphetamines and other psych drugs to deal with side-effects.)
This is a common modus operandi for the pharmaceutical industry and it will help us protect ourselves & our kids, if we learn to recognize it.
A related sleight-of-hand is used to distract us from the damage these drugs do in the causation of school shootings. Here, though, the Mass Media colludes with their big advertiser (Big Pharma) in distracting us from the one "suspect" that is usually present, but rarely mentioned, in most of these violent events: Legally-prescribed, FDA-approved psychotropic drugs.
Instead we are told we need to ban guns, even though guns were around -- and available to kids -- long before there were school shootings -- and were rarely used in indiscriminate shooting sprees of classmates and teachers. Only since the drugging of our children has become so common, has this begun to happen.
It is up to us to realize that Big Pharma and the Mass Media have a lot more power than we do, as citizens. And this power -- and the efforts by many of our politicians and federal agencies to protect the power of the pharmaceutical industry, even though its products play a major role in school shooting episodes -- needs to be discussed openly and curbed.