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 in “Essays”
I know what you’re all thinking: How’s ol’ Flynn doing? Oh, I know you’ve all got your own fish to fry, particularly in this parlous, combustible summer, and with the very flames licking at your…
I was starting my first year at Rutgers Law School in Newark, following a zigzag (should I say Zig Zag?) course that had taken me from a small hill farm in northern Vermont, to Harvard…
New characters in the panoply of history come to light at the Kelley House on a regular basis, often due to generous donations of time and materials to the archives and museum. A case in…
Two nights after we'd established our raucous brood in Mendocino County's serene summer hills, not far from the unsuspecting hamlet of Boonville, we got our first lesson in the psycho-pathology of the pre-pube criminal, the…
“He’s wasn’t a nice guy,” Gerd Stern said on a Saturday afternoon at the Sonoma Valley Museum in Sonoma, California, where Jack London once lived, farmed and wrote fiction and non-fiction. Stern was talking about…
Last week’s column discussed marijuana legalization and some of the adverse consequences, especially economic consequences, it’s having on local communities such as Laytonville. I argued that there are one too many sets of regulations with…