Eli Lilly got FDA approval to market Prozac in December 1987. The company had a brilliant strategy for making it a blockbuster: promote not the drug so much as the disorder — "Clinical Depression," a supposedly widespread "mental illness" that, by the way, Lilly's new "Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitor" could supposedly treat.
Posts published by “Fred Gardner”
The headline on Robert O'Connell's New York Times piece March 27, "Baseball's Unappreciated Power Duo," referred to Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. The piece begins: "Baseball’s great power partnerships range from the foundational (Babe Ruth and Lou…
On New Year's Eve, NBC San Francisco will air a documentary that gives Albion activist Pebbles Trippet proper credit for advancing the movement to legalize marijuana. Peter Coyote narrates the 45 minute video, which uses the Ken…
For months we have all been force-fed a story few of us can digest about the hacking of the Democratic Party's email servers, presumably by Russians commanded by Vladimir Putin himself. The pundits say, "Nothing…
Just arrived in the mailbox is a book called Dangerous Grounds, which recounts how coffeehouses set up near Army bases became hangouts for soldiers during the Vietnam War era. I started the first such enterprise with Donna Mickleson and Devorah Rossman —the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina— in the fall of 1967.
Everybody who knows the history of the medical marijuana movement knows that Dennis Peron started the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club in response to the AIDS epidemic, circa 1990. Less well known is that the Prozac epidemic…
Only in the San Francisco Bay Area did the story cross over from the sports pages to the news pages: on October 30, 2009, Tim Lincecum, the Giants' ace pitcher, was stopped by a Washington…