Resources or government sources are other sources embedded by agencies. Nothing is in there, i tried to avoid activist scientists at all costs. My training basically is an undergraduate degree in economics and philosophy, and i made a terrible error of going to law school for a year and a half and relies advocate doing that i would get a lawyer. Im a bit slow sometimes i admit. In any case ive been covering environmental and scientific issues in one form or another for public television, for Forbes Magazine and reason magazine now for over 30 years. So im an environmental journalist spee1 at a public debate were having today includes one over genetically modified crops as you discussed in the end of this. And basically no one has ever caught us off, stays, belly, sniffle, anything from eating genetically modified crops. In all the scientific literature whatsoever. Unfortunately, it has as i was mentioning earlier about Climate Change has been politicized, is being used as a way of trying to get people, scare people into moving into other directions that people prefer for political reasons as those who scientific reasons. Theres not a single, not a single independent scientific body that is every evaluated heard biotech crops and found them to be harmful to human beings or the environment. Cancer clusters . Catcher cost cancer clusters occur because of random fluctuations. There was a wonderful study, i think last year the basically argued the problem of cancers it is mostly random, that theres no way to predict how you did it. We do know something said to, cigarette smoking, dont do it. I quit. I quit early enough so that my risk is only double what it otherwise wouldve been to get lung cancer. Also dont stay out in the sun too long, dont be too much, dont drink too much and you dramatically reduce her chances of cancer. Whats interesting is most people are think we are in the midst of a cancer epidemic but the fact of the matter is we are not. Caused by environment, chemical . The National Cancer institute and the american cancer both say environmentally caused cancers are about 2 of cancers and that includes both manmade and natural chemicals. Its only 2 , its not the epidemic. Theres no epidemic. The National Cancer institute has pointed out for years now for over the last 20 years or so the actual incidence of cancer by age group has been declining. And instead of going up your chance of getting cancer and englands chances of getting cancer in the United States have been declining. Spin the effect of Rachel Carson and tyler come in your be . Rachel carson ive lived up in a very sincere woman. Is also by the way a journalist who wrote silent brain, as you say. She was very concerned about what was in the modern sector thats coming out and update the case was ddt which is now banned in most places around the world. She amassed little evidence that was at the time and wasnt a lot in an editing that these chemicals were going to cause among other things lots of cancer among people. That prediction has not come true. It is not true. And yet people still believe because of for the exposures to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is a problem. It is and it can be a problem for occupational exposure. There are people who and the Chemical Industry explosive monoclonal antibodies get some diseases that they were having massive exposures, or people who got exposed to asbestos also get mesothelioma. The fact that no people do not work in the Chemical Energy is almost the evidence at all that exposure to synthetic chemicals lead to cancer. Since her time since the 1960s average Life Expectancy in the United States has been going up not down as with more and more chemicals in the environment. We are doing something right, not something wrong. Thats a little bit from the end of doom environmental renewal in the twentyfirst century. Heres the book that the author is ronald bailey. This is booktv on cspan2. Many of you should president ial candidates have written books to introduce themselves to voters and to promote their views on issues. Heres a look at some of the candidates books. Welcome to buffalo on booktv. Located on the Eastern Shore of lake erie at the head of the niagara river, buffalo is the second most popular, populous city in new york. Would help of our Time Warner Cable partners over the next night in his with her from local authors about the citys history including the stories of irish immigrants from bubbles first ward burton we will visit the mark twain wrote that the buffalo and Erie County Public Library as well as about the same as writers time youre in the 1830s. First we speak with local author David Herzberg about americas issue with medication as he talked about his book happy pills in america from miltown to prozac. If youre a woman you know what it means to be needed. You know how much fun it can be. You know how all the fun can go out of your life with an exhausting headache. But now you have special help. Happy pills in america is a cultural history of psychiatric medications from the 1950s up through the 1990s. I became deeply interested in the Cultural Impact of this idea that we will were our brain and we could intervene in the functioning of our brains to produce the kind of outcomes excited because outcomes we wanted without cost. I thought how would this change the way we think about being human . How does this change what we think about our society, our interaction between people, even our politics . If such a novel way of thinking about ourselves. So i decided to write a cultural history of these drugs, not the story who discovered which drug when and not a store that would be about do the drugs work, for example, to cure depression or anxiety. There was a lively debate about that. I was more interested in how do people use these drugs to tell stories about what it means to be human, for these new things available it seems to provide new insight as to what we were like, and how did it change the way that we talked about what we are like him about what humans need about what humans a which of the about the best way to take it of ourselves, about what the goals of life ought to be and all these other major philosophical social, political questions. Thats when i decide to look into and to start with the prozac phenomenon because thats the one that was unfolding before my eyes and thats what caught my interest. Prozac was a prescription medication, adult it was described in very abstract terms is being treated for depression, in practical terms in American Culture this wasnt the kind of illness that had been associated with white middleclass or affluent people who have access to doctors, who were encouraged to think that they were supposed to be happy and if they were, maybe that was an illness. Because in theory their lives were good. Specifically for women who have been prescribed these types of medications at twice the rate of men throughout the whole time, not just prozac. So this is both a majority people who used it and also it became linked in the popular imagination, all these controversies about the drug were about white middleclass life come into a different set of drugs, socalled street drugs, they were associated, even though they use wasnt necessarily concentrate in central cities and racialized minoritys. Thats where if you would read a popular debate about what they say about our society they would be linked to those populations. Drugs like prozac and before valium and others were associated with those middleclass white suburban households, and the kind of dramas that people talked about were also a way of talking about what was going on with that particular group of people in america. Since world war ii and to try to understand both the origin of this phenomenon and what its early chapters look like and what do much else about what we are experiencing a. And i discovered for the one thing as i said before, that its not new, that there had been these generations of new drugs that claim to be these technological wonders that teach us about our consciousness and ourselves, that they have been massively, widely used well before the prozac era or the modern era use of psychoactive medications can talking about the sedatives, stimulants and narcotics, have been very, very widely used since the mid19th century at least. Why did so many people want to take these drugs . And this, i mean i think theres a couple of different ways to answer that question. One way would be to say heres what i think people were taking those drugs. More interesting to me as a cultural historian was all the people try to answer that question over time when they said, lets say in the 50s and 60s, why did some housewives want to take tranquilizers like miltown and valium and they go back and forth over this question, what was causing all this, all these problems among american housewife. You would find different answers coming from one set of people like doctors at this time, medical textbooks and advertisers of the drugs. There was a range between thinking it was just phoning that these complaining when they were kind of annoying, they were bored and so do what the doctor to doctor because their the doctor had to talk to them educated and instructed how to get them out of your hair. From that to a general, deeply sexist belief that women were just inherently ill in every stage of the life was a new risk for them that they were frail and vulnerable, and that most of the problems came from being sick and had come that they might come and complain about feeling really a lot of come to my complaint about the wide range of things and the doctor would think its just females in passionate and there had troubles come a little tranquilizer will ease you engage out the door. When it became clear to tranquilizers could become addictive, women and allies who see mass tranquilizers used as a way to get advertiser problem of women are constrained into the home, they say addiction has got legs. Youd like to talk about addiction. They like to think about addiction, and stories about addicted women are especially good for the media. If we tell the story as you are these women who are unhappy in their roles and doctors addicted to drugs which can ruin their lives, that is a store that gets why duplicate it plays in all kinds of places that are not the places that are reporting on feminist fatigue of household arrangements but the report on this story. When prozac comes one of the reasons what is so successful is that all of the various things they say prozac can do are designed to answer one of the feminist criticisms of the tranquilizers. Tranquilizers just are supposed to sedate you and make it okay with a situation thats not okay. Osac will lift you up, did you more spunk, lie you to push back. Valium is addictive. Prozac is not addictive. Valium kind of legion not doing much. Prozac will give the energy to go and work in the office and then come home and do the things you need to do at home. A debate about prozac look different because there were some people who were saying, widespread use of prozac shows women have made all these advances and that they are no longer being handed these savages, whereas others were saying you still cant fix biases in the workplace by taking a pill that just changes your inside. User got to do something about the structure of yourself. Most of these medications were used by women. Thats still means there were millions and minds of men who use them, even if they used and that only half the rate. I can pass filter with this story from the 1950s when, this was a time when after decades of depression and war does a push from different corners to try to restore men to their proper a wall is considered the proper and traditional role as heads of household and important people at work. Then along comes this tranquilizer, milltown, and millions are taking it. Most of them are women but there still a lot of men. When it gets noticed that a lot of men partake of tranquilizer when theyre supposed to being strong and tough, theres a minor panic over it, americans are getting soft and will be beaten by the soviets because our ms. Fudge is going to be relaxing on a tranquilizer while they are building new Nuclear Missiles. This causes a problem for the company that makes milltown. They want as many people to benefit from the drug as possible, and so they develop a whole new exposition of why men are taking the drug. They say heres the thing. American men are not begin going soft american men are so much too strong, underneath the suit underneath that suit is a caveman, just like one layer of skin away with a big club that is always ready to buy a jaguar. But in modern society you dont have a club, theres no jaguar. So the things that make you anxious are more abstract, Nuclear Missiles like a thousand miles away. That will never go away so they are saying these men were so strong, primitive and final, the fact that many to take a tranquilizer just to bring them down to Something Like normal, that shows they are strong, not that they are weak. That in itself is an argument about what it means to be human. It means to our caveman sitting inside our brains come they only talk about men having caveman, but thats a theory about the mind that came out of this complex interaction between the cultural pressures on men from the economic pressures on advertisers and this attempt to address this phenomenon of mean taking more these tranquilizers. Medical advertising ironically was less regulated in some ways than advertising of other goods because medical advertising was restricted to positions, and physicians are supposed to no more than idle regulators. What is a federal regulator going to tell someone to put in an advertisement to positions . They say you cant fool a doctor so that was wide leeway and constraints on what you could say in a medical advertisement. Even the requirement that you tell the truth, that doesnt become a requirement until 1962. Its clear and it always has been that to some degree having a set of drugs that are understood as relatively safe, that make people feel good, but thats just on this been in the doctors told back since the late 19th century, especially for the relatively affluent white respectable patient, giving them these drugs has been an in was part of medical practice for one of 20 years. If you have gone back and reconstructed the percentages out whats in prescriptions, late 19th century, 25 of all prescriptions had morphing into. When you get to the early 20th century it was up to 30 had coding to buy arguments into some of which went 3050 had either a sedative like a barbiturate or stimulant like amphetamine in a. It goes on and on like this. That part of medical practice weekend to discover it every few years as new, doctors are prescribing a lot of mind influencing drugs as if its new but its inconsistent. A lot of these medications are almost literally the same substance to a classic example of amphetamine which is the ingredient in active, hyperactivity attention to set the sake of medications are amphetamine at the same time theres a war against illegal use of amphetamine. Theyre channeling a lot of amphetamine to College Students which you could imagine 20th we may say i wonder if that was a good idea, but at the moment it makes sense because of the giveaways we think about pharmaceutical drug use and street drug use. Does a brief moment in the 70s when the logic, the logic which is very racialized logic, gets challenged. And for a little while you see a sharp drop off in the use of mind influencing medications. Button does work prozac comes in. Prozac is the first drug that really breaks back through it and says youre worried about addiction, sexism, all the stuff. This drug is the answer to all those problems, and its a sign the pharmaceutical industry has learned its lesson, its been out in the wilderness, its learn to make better drugs to deal with those problems and a whole new slew drug of come as a whole new slew of drugs, a claim to overcome those problems through the magic of technology that another when people a hobby for me with is the narcotic oxycontin or extended release form of a drug has been rough for her longtime, hydrocodone but new Technology Made so they could release its medication slowly over time and this made it supposedly resistant to being abused. And, of course, everyone knows now that you can just crush up those bills and snort them or find ways to inject him. So in a lot of cases what you see is, its another chapter in that where weve ended in a truck that takes care of those past problems. This one really is magic. Whats interesting about that is it claims to magic, claims to transformation, like this is the pill that will give you your dreams with no cost. Thats kind of a consumer culture promise. Thats what the new car is going to do for you. And its less something that in the long span of medicine has been associate with what a doctor promises you. But what happened at the beginning of the 20th century and a special with the discovery of antibiotics like penicillin, inmates injured his suddenly medicine did have some miracle drugs. What can you say, the cure these illnesses and they dont seem to have any problematic side effects. And so it made a medical enterprise in new ways that, could make these promises, like maybe, if you can cure tuberculosis with a pill, maybe you can take a pill and it would just make you a brighter, funnier, better person. So that in some ways distinctly american desire for magic has kept this thing going. We are now living in the aftermath of one of those moments, right, with the epidemic of Prescription Drug abuse. That came along with what was in some ways a really beneficial decision that now they can treat pain. Theres a kind of human suffering that weve been so scared of narcotics that we are not treating it. Now well take it seriously and treated. Thats a Good Development but it gets mixed up with the desire for magic and his powerful engines of the pharmaceutical industry to take the desire for magic enter into blockbuster drugs. And to become something very different than it started out as. Now on booktv a literary tour of buffalo, new york, with help of our local cable partner Time Warner Cable we start our trip with the coeditors of go, tell michelle. Please know your you are not alone. You on your beautiful family are thought of an in pray fo