Drugged-up, dumbed-down

LOUIS THEROUX and Jon Ronson have a lot to answer for. Since these two television presenters made a fine art of talking to lunatics they have brought the conspiracy theory into the mainstream.

Well, perhaps not. Theroux and Ronson were simply riding a wave – to suggest otherwise would itself be a conspiracy.

Since the mid-1990s the once fringe activity of giving credence conspiracy theories has become a popular alternative to actual engagement with political and intellectual life. The once popular television drama the X-Files latched-on to public scepticism about the role of government, business and the military and served-up stories of alien abduction, government cover-ups and just about anything else that could be scribbled down by a fevered imagination. Of course, the X-Files was fiction, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t tapping-in to a widespread, if inchoate, sense that all was not well in the world. One might say it caught the zeitgeist.

This spectacle reached its nadir with the conspiracies surrounding September 11 attacks in 2001. (1) Since then we’ve had Skull and Bones, Bilderberg (the conspiracy that wouldn’t go away) and dozens more.

Most recently, the so-called ‘Zeitgeist movement’ has taken every hokey old anti-Semitic conspiracy known to man, stuck it in the washing machine and come up with a freshly laundered load of old cobblers. To their credit the ‘Zeitgeisters’ don’t appear to be anti-Semitic at all – but if that’s the best that can be said about a political movement it’s a pretty sad indictment.

The saddest thing about conspiracy theories, though, is that they actually obscure genuine political, business and military chicanery. Happily most people reject conspiracy theories out of hand, at least the most outlandish ones. The problem is, there is another class of conspiracy theory that is enjoying a renewed popularity – a peculiarly middle-class kind of conspiracy theory.

Consider medicine, for instance. At precisely the same time that millions of people are demanding public healthcare in the United States others – and sometimes the same people – are engaged in propagating low level conspiracies about… medicine.

I have been considering writing about the pharmaceutical industry for some time but have recently been given pause for thought.

In the course of my research for a forthcoming newspaper article I came across the, in my opinion, objectionable prescription of a pharmaceutical for an absolute non-illness. On the other hand, there is the wider issue that fearing modern medicine and pointing the finger at drug companies is the ne plus ultra of acceptable middle-class conspiracy theories. From the absurd anti-MMR hysteria to the ridiculous notion that pharmaceutical companies are nothing other than licenced ‘drug dealers’ (as if their products had no benefits whatsoever), it has become common dinner party prattle to complain about medicine while suggesting all manner of ’natural’ remedies for every ailment imaginable (and often imaginary).

The absurdity of these arguments is only highlighted by the fact that many of those making them are only to happy to nosebag unlicenced pharmaceuticals, whether in the form of herbal remedies, imaginary homeopathic ‘medicines’ or recreational drugs.

As forth has already been smeared (2) I had no desire to see myself accused (inaccurately) of shilling for a multi-billon dollar industry but… what the hell, who cares?

I personally am ‘enjoying’ some symptoms of discontinuation syndrome from a prescription medication. It is not pleasant. But it is also not anything like the appalling list of truly horrific symptoms I had been expecting after reading comments on the internet, symptoms so bad that an enterprising lawyer is preparing a class action lawsuit – because we all know those work so well.

In fact, this is why I am writing about my personal experiences: I actually have no particular desire to share with you, dear readers, the fact that I feel poorly due to discontinuation, but given recent events I feel forced to explain my motivations lest they themselves are knitted into the fabric of another imaginary ‘big lie’.

Just today a colleague told me he was being harangued by someone insisting that fluoridation of the water was a conspiracy led by ’the dental lobby’. Quite apart from the fact that ’the dental lobby’ gives me a mental image of a hotel foyer decorated like the inside of a mouth, surely any organised gang of dentists would prefer the water was unfluoridation, thus guaranteeing more custom for themselves?

My friend’s interlocutor went on: the Health Service Executive (HSE) was in on the conspiracy, apparently. This rather ignores the fact that the one thing the HSE has proved is that it is incapable of orchestrating a health service, let alone a complicated conspiracy.

Of course, the real answer is much less dramatic: drug companies are capitalist enterprises, no better and no worse than any other. Occasionally mistakes are made, such as famously with thalidomide (which itself is a useful and important drug, just one that should not be prescribed to pregnant women), but this does not mean that the industry is ‘evil’.

The obsession with ’toxins’, whether literal or figurative, is the defining characteristic of contemporary sociopolitical discourse. Whether it’s evil forces ‘polluting’ politics or the obsession with ‘detoxing’ and purging our bodies (something the liver does perfectly well on its own) there is a sense abroad that we live in a dangerous era, surrounded by all manner of dark forces. This paranoid worldview is a real threat to genuine social change: if we cannot actually comprehend the world how can we hope to effect any change in it?

Worse still, what change we do see caused by our wrongheaded assaults is often change for the worse. The outlawing of the pesticide DDT has resulted in countless millions of deaths through malaria despite not a single shred of evidence that it is harmful to human health. In the case of pharmaceuticals, whinging about drug companies obscures the fact that in many countries – Ireland included – decent, universal healthcare is still not a reality.

Of course, maybe I’m just a ‘useful fool’. (3)

(1) A conspiracy of dunces, Jason Walsh, the Guardian, May 18, 2006
(2) An open letter to forth readers, Jason Walsh, forth, May 5, 2010
(3) Is ‘Forth’ magazine an unwitting front for a bizarre neo-liberal network?, David Miller & Claire Robinson, Indymedia Ireland, May 7, 2010