Is the GOP maintaining its base through prescription drug addiction?

[barbaraann]

Rush Limbaugh, CJ Rehnquist--many rightwingers seem to be addicted to prescription drugs. Laura Bush? Ann Coulter?

Utah has a very high rate of anti-depressant users and is arguably the most Republican state in the union.

I'm not taking any drugs and I wonder about the rest of you. Are we lucid because we are not being prescribed prescription drugs? Is anyone here on psychoactive prescription drugs?

[donsu]

1. blackmail is part of their business

nt

[belle]

2. Oh for God's sake, not this. Zoloft and Wellbutrin saved my depressed ass.

[barbaraann]

4. I'm asking. I don't know.

I keep trying to figure out how "humans" can be such tools of evil.

[yurbud]

3. would be better as a poll question, but...

you can't lump all of them together.

Anti-depressants are a different ball game from the misused pain-killers and tranquilizers of Rush and company. Depression drugs help you engage the world, and the others are meant to numb it.

The one good criticism I heard of anti-depressants came from Roseanne Barr (who is from Utah ironically). She said she stopped taking them because she realized they made the intolerable tolerable.

I could see how that would apply to living in Utah.

[alittlelark]

5. A doctor tried tto convince me to go on Paxil a few years ago

I tried it for 2 weeks or so. It made me nervous, sweaaty and shaky. I told the doctor that in the follow-up. He saaid that those problems will go away after a few more weeks.

I stopped taking Paxil the next day.... it took 3 months for me to feel normal again.

Psychotropic drugs are dangerous, and should only be prescribed by a Psychiatrist. My family doctor had no buisness trying to convince me to take them.

Drug addiction makes you less able to think clearly, that much I am sure of.