Ten Drugs Quotes

“Quality-of-life drugs that treat symptoms can be prescribed endlessly; if a patient stops taking them, the symptoms return. So they make money endlessly. Given the high costs of drug development, it’s easy to understand why drugmakers want that kind of payoff. The need for profit skews the kinds of drugs that are developed. It explains why drugmakers are putting very little effort into finding desperately needed new antibiotics and a lot of money into finding drugs that can treat the symptoms of aging.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“Sanger and McCormick had been battling for decades against all the “Comstockery” that followed, a lawmaking passion at the state and local level for wiping out all forms of immoral and obscene behavior. Comstockery banned the sale of contraceptives in twenty-two states. Comstockery made it illegal in thirty states to run advertisements about birth control. In Massachusetts, where Pincus was doing his research, Comstockery meant that giving a single contraceptive pill to a woman could result in a $1,000 fine or five years in prison. And Comstockery meant you couldn’t perform human tests of birth control in the United States.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“The motivation behind the enormous investment in the [Rockefeller Foundation’s] new agenda was to develop the human sciences as a comprehensive explanatory and applied framework of social control grounded in the natural, medical, and social sciences.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“there are only so many targets for drugs in the body (around eight thousand potential places for drugs to work, by one estimate),”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease, but an error of judgment.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“The National Academy of Sciences released a report in 1980 suggesting that widespread efforts to control cholesterol levels lacked a good scientific basis, and many researchers remained unconvinced that cholesterol was all that bad. Regardless, the public, spurred by their physicians, started getting their cholesterol checked and making lifestyle decisions based on the results.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

“In the end, no one knew what caused madness.”
― Thomas Hager, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine