Life expectancy in industrialized nations, the medical industry in these nations, and the planet's human population have been growing geometrically in the last few centuries. Yet scourges of disease still kill vast numbers of people every day. To me, these facts somehow do not add up.

According to Adbusters Magazine, 30 million Americans take anti-depressants every day. That is almost the entire population of Canada. Brand name drugs feature prominently, and they should, because $5 billion dollars is spent on drug advertising every year.

Do not let figure just blow by you, like most of us do with statistics that are more than thousands. How many of the world's nations have a gross domestic product (GDP) of less than $5 billion? How many have a GDP of more than that? Do not forget that that figure is for advertising only, and does not include budgets these corporations spend on development, lobbying governments, and "research". Also, in the 1990s, anti-depressant use grew by 800 per cent. And yet researchers at the University of Buffalo have found that, in rats, Ritalin causes long term changes in the brain similar to those caused by cocaine. Eli Lilly & Co., makers of Prozac, know that the drug causes akathisia in some people, a reaction which leads to suicide and even homicide-suicide (http://www.prozacspotlight.org).

If life expectancy has grown so much, should we not be happy? In the last 200 years, humans have developed countless new comforts: electricity, the telephone, automobiles, central heating, plumbing, airplanes, computers, cinema, television, etc. The list is long. So, today's anti-depressant use would suggest, by a certain logic, that before all of these comforts were invented the world's suicide rate must have been astronomical.

This, of course, is not the case. People were not throwing themselves off cliffs en masse because they felt so keenly their lack of flushable toilets and e-mail. So why the rampant pill-swallowing today? Who is controlling the bulk of the world's fight against illness? What is the motivation of those people? Another important question for today's world is what is defined as illness and who maintains that definition?

On December 24 of last year, I contracted a cold. The cold went away, but the sore throat did not. I have a sore throat for eight months. One month later, I saw an ear, nose, and throat specialist who told me that I had traumatic laryngitis. That day I began months of unpaid sick leave from my job. The first diagnosis was wrong: I do not have laryngitis. Nor do I have temporomandibular joint disease or fibromyalgia. I have tried six or seven different drugs. One resulted in a massive steroid withdrawal rebound, another in a dozen canker sores, a full body rash and back, another in a physical dependency causing cold sweats, nausea, dizziness, and insomnia, and another in numb arms.