On the absurdity of drugs (or: why didn't someone tell me that the world's foremost physicians flee the use of any drugs whatsoever?)

• "We are prone to thinking of drug abuse in terms of the male population and illicit drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. It may surprise you to learn that a greater problem exists with millions of people dependent on legal prescription drugs." Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.

• "Medicines are of subordinate importance because of their very nature they can only work symptomatically." Hans Kusche, M.D.

• "If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity" Oliver Wendell Holmes, (Prof. of Med.Harvard University)

• "Drug medications consists in employing, as remedies for disease, those things which produce disease in well persons. Its materia medica is simply a lot of drugs or chemicals or dye-stuffs in a word: poisons. All are incompatible with vital matter; all produce disease when brought in contact in any manner with the living; all are poisons." R.T. TraIl, M.D., in a two and one half hour lecture to members of congress and the medical profession, delivered at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.

•  "Every drug increases and complicates the patients condition." Robert Henderson, M.D.

• "Drugs never cure disease. They merely hush the voice of nature's protest, and pull down the danger signals she erects along the pathway of transgression. Any poison taken into the system has to be reckoned with later on even though it palliates present symptoms. Pain may disappear, but the patient is left in a worse condition, though unconscious of it at the time." Daniel. H. Kress, M.D.

• "The greatest part of all chronic disease is created by the suppression of acute disease by drug poisoning." Henry Lindlahr, M.D.

• "Every educated physician knows that most diseases are not appreciably helped by medicine." Richard C. Cabot, M.D. (Mass. Gen. Hospital)

• "Medicine is only palliative, for back of disease lies the cause, and this cause no drug can reach." Wier Mitchel, M.D.

• "The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine." William Osler, M.D.

• "Medical practice has neither philosophy nor common sense to recommend it. In sickness the body is already loaded with impurities. By taking drug-medicines more impurities are added, thereby the case is further embarrassed and harder to cure." Elmer Lee, M.D., Past Vice President, Academy of Medicine.

• "Our figures show approximately four and one half million hospital admissions annually due to the adverse reactions to drugs. Further, the average hospital patient has as much as thirty percent chance, depending howlong he is in, of doubling his stay due to adverse drug reactions." Milton Silverman, M.D. (Professor of Pharmacology, University of California)

• "Why would a patient swallow a poison because he is ill, or take that which would make a well man sick." L.F. Kebler, M.D.

• "What hope is there for medical science to ever become a true science when the entire structure of medical knowledge is built around the idea that there is an entity called disease which can be expelled when the right drug is found?" John H. Tilden, M.D.

•  "The necessity of teaching mankind not to take drugs and medicines, is a duty incumbent upon all who know their uncertainty and injurious effects; and the time is not far distant when the drug system will be abandoned." Charles Armbruster, M. D.

• "The cause of most disease is in the poisonous drugs physicians superstitiously give in order to effect a cure." Charles E. Page, M.D. 

Note: While intelligent physicians minimize drugs, some of the world's most powerful industries spend billions advertising drugs and influencing regulatory agencies exactly as do the purveyors of tobacco and alcohol.  No doubt they all will remain successful as long as the ordinary person maintains their deep faith that drugs can possibly help.