In the 1800s few doctors actually held medical degrees. Known as physicians, they diagnosed patients and recommended medications. The other “doctors,” who did surgery or who prescribed various health tonics, learned their trade apprenticing under a medical mentor.

     Meanwhile, John D. Rockefeller, the oil baron, recognized that his monopoly of Standard Oil was about to be broken up by the government’s anti-trust purge, and he began looking for another lucrative business venture. He chose petrochemicals. He recognized that only synthetic drugs made from petrochemicals could be patented — natural health remedies could not — but he then had to clear the way for his creation of what would become a comparable monopoly to Standard Oil in the petrochemical industry.

     First he created the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901. That organization began pioneering research and development of petrochemical-based medicines such as vaccines, antibiotics and the  chemical-based drugs that would ultimately become the foundation of today’s pharmaceutical industry.

     This research flew in the face of the most popular health therapies of the day, such as homeopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy, as well as all of the popular “natural” potions and herbal medicines on the market then.

     Many of these “cures” were mixtures that contained cocaine, heroin, and other dangerous, but then legal chemicals. Their popularity resulted in illness and death, though, and in 1906 the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry was given the power to regulate interstate commerce of foods and drugs and cull the marketplace of these dangerous potions.

     This fit in perfectly with Rockefeller’s campaign to turn public and government opinion against such popular remedies, and he almost undoubtedly worked behind the scenes to encourage this legislation.

     In 1910 Rockefeller helped fund the Flexner Report. This broadly disseminated publication ridiculed natural medicine as “unscientific quackery” and called for a standardization of medical education in the country. Abraham Flexner, the author of the report, soon began serving on the Rockefeller Foundation 's General Education Board , and after 1917 he was made its secretary.

     By the time the Flexner Report was released, Rockefeller had already begun donating millions of dollars to medical schools, starting with the prestigious University of Chicago and Yale medical schools, with the stipulation they only teach pharmaceutical-based allopathic medicine. The American Medical Association, a union of allopathic physicians which had been established in 1847, now came into prominence as the country’s most influential ruling agency with exclusive power over granting and issuing medical licenses in America.

     Next, Rockefeller and his robber baron associates Carnegie and J.P. Morgan formed a partnership and bought controlling shares of the pharmaceutical giant I. G. Farben, a German pharmaceutical company that would supply the newly patented synthetic medicines that American doctors were now being educated to prescribe.

     Rockefeller now had a compliant Bureau of Chemistry, which in 1927 became the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Organization (later the Food and Drug Administration) and a significant investment in the production of pharmaceutical medicine that could be patented for profit.

     Now he only needed to establish a body of doctors who could exclusively write the prescriptions for what he foresaw would become the vast market for  psychotropic medications, given the experimentation that he saw the Nazis doing in this field with the cooperation of I. G. Farben’s laboratories.

     In 1930 Rockefeller funded a ten year,  $1,000,000 grant to the Yale Medical School to establish their School of Psychiatry. Three years later Charles-Edward Winslow, Professor of Public Health at Yale, founded the  National Committee on Mental Hygiene, the organization that launched the mental hygiene movement in America and set the stage for the widespread chemical treatment of “mental disorders.”

     In 1938 the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act 1938 was signed into law and in 1951 the Durham-Humphrey Amendment to it defined which dangerous drugs, like barbiturates, could only be prescribed and refilled by licensed doctors such as psychiatrists.

     In 1992 Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act that requires drug and biologics manufacturers to pay fees to the FDA for product applications and supplements, and other services. The act also requires the FDA to use these funds to hire more reviewers to assess drug applications.

     Today forty percent of the FDA overall is funded by Big Pharma, and 75 percent of its drug division is  funded by Big Pharma. Psychiatrists predominate on the FDA approval boards for new psychotropic  medication and members of those boards often move on to lucrative employment in Big Pharma companies.

     The Medical Mafia – the FDA, Big Pharma, and psychiatry – is alive and well and, oh, so profitable thanks to Rockefeller’s overt and covert manipulation of the public and the U.S. government until he died in 1937. By then the damage to America’s health and mental health was done and his new monopoly was firmly in place.

     It still is.