GAIA Health – by Heidi Stevenson
Human emotions are now targets for drug research. A new study, bought and paid for by Big Pharma, claims to have found the single molecule responsible for sadness. And you thought sadness had something to do with sad events? Apparently not. It’s just a sequence of chemical changes. Stop that, and you’ll never be sad again.
In the never-ending rush to find targets for drugs to sell, scientists have found “the” molecule that they say is the “cause” of depression, stress, and anxiety. So now, all they need to do to fix sadness is find a drug that can block it.
Haven’t we heard this story before? Wasn’t it serotonin? And later, when that didn’t work, didn’t they decide that dopamine must be part of the picture, too?
That led us to drug-induced suicides and mass school killings. So, the whole serotonin-dopamine chemical imbalance theory of depression didn’t pan out too well.
But hey! Forget about all that! Now we have a brand new target! Just think of it: New drugs—a whole new round of chemicals to palm off on a credulous medical system and naive public—to bring in a whole new mass of profits!
The molecule is called corticotropin releasing factor (CRF). Perhaps they should start calling it crief?
The grand new finding is by … who’da guessed? … a pharmaceutical drug company’s bought-and-paid-for scientists. The company, Heptares, describes itself as having “built a unique capability for discovering novel molecules that target historically undruggable or challenging GPCRs [G protein-coupled receptors]“.
The Sunday Times reports that Heptares’ chief scientist states:
Now we know its shape, we can design a molecule that will lock into this crevice and block it so that CRF1 becomes inactive—ending the biochemical cascade that ends in stress.
Whether this molecule is required for other purposes is never considered by pseudo science. The idea that people need to feel their full range of emotions is not factored into their calculations. All that matters is that they’ve found a new target for drug development.
Just think. The day may be coming when no one will ever again need to feel the misery of sadness, when stress will be banished. After all, who needs stress in a time when there are no tigers hunting us?
Brave New World, here we come!
http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2013-07-21/study-finds-the-cause-of-sadness/
Now if they can only invent a drug to fix stupid.
Finally, no more mourning for those passed on, we can all be happy that it wasnt us this time. Wouldnt the same drug cause a lack of remorse also?
Reminds me of the Movie “Equilibrium”.