How John D. Rockefeller Made Us Think Happy Pills Are “Happy”

     John D. Rockefeller’s manipulation of the American medical industry is pretty well documented. As the richest man in the world, he had been deprived of his oil industry monopoly and had then spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding the country’s most reputable medical schools, like Yale and the University of Chicago to start with. As long as they taught only allopathic medicine and advocated only pharmaceutical remedies, not homeopathic ones, he would continue his massive investments in them.

     All pharmaceutical products are petroleum based, and John D. still had plenty of connections to that lucrative industry and was investing even more in pharmaceutical firms such as Germany’s I.G. Farben.

     Today’s psychiatric drugs are also petrochemically based, and in the 1930s Rockefeller’s millions were invested to make sure that his new army of allopathic doctors were also trained as psychiatrists in the institutions his Rockefeller foundation was then funding. Between 1929 and 1949 the Rockefeller Foundation gave more than $16 million — $240 million in today’s market — to university psychiatry departments, psychiatry conferences, and individual grants for researchers in psychiatry.

     But, he still had to educate the public on how happy they could be by consuming the upcoming array of petrochemical “happy pills” they were about to be introduced to. Rockefeller’s money then began funding a number of institutions specializing in “social science,” such as the American Institute of Human Relations and its British equivalent, the Tavistock Insitute of Human Relations.

     “Social science” purported to study the ills that a modern society was facing, but psychiatrists needed to show that an individual mental condition was behind all humanity’s ills so they could justify prescribing the tsunami of happy pills the public was consuming by the 1950s. Alan Gregg was the Director of the Medical Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation at that time and he was responsible for its massive funding for research in neurobiologic correlates of psychiatric illness.

     People began to be told they could put their chemical imbalance back into balance with a little pill and they’d be happy. Today more than 80,000,000 Americans are taking those happy little antidepressants.

     And Big Pharma is now a $1.5 trillion dollar industry, thanks to John D. Only those wealthy Eli Lilly, Merck and Pfizer execs don’t need any of those little happy pills to make them happy.