Off Label (2012) - full transcript
A road trip through medicalized America, examining the pervasiveness of pharmaceutical drugs through the lives of eight very unique characters.
It's a transient lifestyle.
And long story short,
I take drugs for a living.
Human drug testing.
When a lot of people
see my scars,
they think I'm a drug user,
kind of think
they're, like, track marks...
for, uh,
injecting heroin, but--
After they get about 100 needles in there,
it's gonna leave a mark.
That's for damn sure.
And I've been in studies...
where we had 100 sticks
in, like, 14 days.
That's a lot more traffic than I like going through my veins.
I mean, that's what
I'm being paid to do.
I'm being paid to be poked,
prodded, uh, tested.
And if I didn't want to do that,
I wouldn't be here doing it.
I have to believe that I'm doing something to help out society.
I could be saving the lives
of many people.
But do I really believe that?
It's hard to.
Compared to what we have.
And when you look for mascara,
look for--
Output is a wall--
My name is Robert Helms,
and I am a professional
guinea pig.
There's a take/take relationship between
me and the pharmaceutical companies.
My name is Robert Helms,
and I am a professional guinea pig.
They need bodies to do
the testing, and I need money.
So, uh, no, I don't
have any moral qualms.
My name is Robert Helms,
and I'm a professional guinea pig.
The real Robert Helms
makes his living...
as a human guinea pig
for scientific exper--
When you're a guinea pig,
you have to fit the description
they're looking for.
You have to be drug-free,
and you have to pass a medical screening,
and the only way to consistently
do that over and over is to lie.
To Tell the Truth.
Now let's meet our panelists.
If you say you've got anything
wrong in your medical history,
you're going to be less likely
to get the job...
than the next guy in line
who's very consistently lying.
Number three, d-did
something happen to you...
that made you want to do
something like this?
The doctor who examines you
knows that you're lying,
but when I lie to them,
I'm only lying so I can get work, which I need.
Okay, number two,
how much do you make for doing something like this?
Up to something
like $350 a day.
Now, how that plays into determining
whether the drug is safe and effective,
that's not my work.
Number two or number three?
It's time to find out now
which one of our players...
is the real human guinea pig.
Will the real Robert Helms
please stand up?
If I'm lying,
I'm lying for pennies.
This is not a mansion
you're looking at here.
This is a rented room
where I and my cats live.
When they lie,
they're lying so that they can make billions of dollars...
over the course of many years while they have the patent on the drug.
They have an agenda
to prescribe these drugs...
to as many people as possible.
It's their agenda
inside your body.
They want to make money,
and they have to use healthy guinea pigs...
in the regular society.
They're not able to use prisoners anymore.
They wish they could.
This is Holmesburg prison here.
This is where I served time at
from 1964 to 1966.
I was in for sales
of marijuana.
This is my first time there.
I'm scared, young-- 20 years old.
When I first got in there,
I seen all these inmates walking around...
with bandages
all over their bodies.
I found out these guys was on tests from the University of Pennsylvania...
under Dr. Albert Kligman.
And at first,
they were minor tests,
you know,
like a Johnson & Johnson bubble bath test.
And at the time,
it was paying something like 30-something dollars.
So I said, "Put me on that."
But it wasn't the bubble bath.
The people was crooked in the hospital.
They sprayed this stuff on my back that
had all these deadly chemicals in it...
that went
into my bloodstream.
I start breaking out with these little red,
pustular bumps all over my body.
My hands and feet got that big.
One finger was that fat.
This stuff here on my fingers,
they are constantly itchy,
burning.
I scratch them till they bleed.
I have prostate cancer,
degenerative rheumatoid arthritis and hepatitis C.
Bubble bath does this
to somebody, man?
Dr. Kligman didn't look at us
as human beings.
He looked at us as
a commodity...
or a number or skin
to experiment on.
You know, sure enough,
guinea pigs.
Now, I got on the other test,
uh, taking pills.
I had to take seven pills
three times a day.
But they did a job on me.
They dehydrated my intestines.
They locked my bowels.
And they're taking me in the back of Holmesburg and butchered me.
They butchered me back there.
These tests, man, was something
that should've never been.
You doing time in there.
That's part of your life missing.
That's penalty enough.
I'm damaged, man.
I'm damaged goods...
from getting
into things blindly,
not knowing what I was
really doing to myself,
and they knew.
They knew.
They knew exactly.
They coerced us to believe
that the testing was safe.
You can destroy your life
taking stuff into your system.
It's gonna come back to haunt you, man,
you know?
And that's the way life is,
you know?
All right, man.
Let's get out of here, man.
It's getting late.
I got to get up in the morning and go to the clinic.
Follow that light, Jack.
Been doing med studies for...
two,
going on three years now,
I believe.
Doing a study to pay
for my wedding.
Met my fiancée hopping
freight trains,
and, uh, we've been together
ever since.
And now we're trying
to save up money,
trying to start a family here
pretty soon hopefully...
and get the heck
out of here.
Here's Laura
when I first met her.
I got pictures of her
all over.
We even
each other out.
Yeah, we're good--
good balance.
I've always done kind of odd-job
stuff for medical studies.
I can help you get
on a freight train...
or hitchhike wherever
in a couple days,
but I'd like a home,
and you need a steady income for that.
I'm worried about money now,
you know?
It's just--
I hate money.
Yup.
Dollar bills.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dan always looked into things
very, very deeply--
much too deeply.
And I do think that did contribute to his mental illness.
He didn't laugh things off.
I wish he had.
This was his college graduation in 2000.
And a birthday card
that he made for me.
I think he was probably
about seven.
And he says everybody
is smiling, but no,
everybody is
not smiling anymore.
Dan became ill,
and I got him into
Fairview Riverside Hospital...
in Minneapolis
in November of 2003.
And within a few days,
he was put into a clinical study...
that was run by his attending physician,
Dr. Stephen C. Olson.
He was
his attending physician...
and also the principal investigator in the clinical study.
It's an obvious
conflict of interest.
Dan had the choice of either
going into the study...
or going into a mental hospital.
He chose the study.
Dr. Olson had control
over Dan's freedom.
He was taken off
his treatment medication...
and put on the study medication,
which turned out to be Seroquel.
These clinical studies are marketing ploys
for the pharmaceutical companies...
on drugs that were approved
over a dozen years ago...
and should no longer
have to be studied.
I had no one else to turn to.
You know, we had tried
for everyone to help us.
Because Dan was of legal age,
I had no way of getting him out of the study,
you know,
other than pleading with the doctors to let him out,
which they would not.
It was obvious he was deteriorating by his demeanor.
He was losing a lot of weight,
and he was gaunt.
And he felt he was being
plagued by devils.
He was--
psychotic.
I told Dr. Olson,
"I know my son."
I said,
"I see this inner rage.
Please, don't let it
come boiling out."
Which it did.
And I can still remember
Father O'Hotto saying that,
"Your son passed away."
And...
I remember thinking,
"Oh, how ridiculous.
No, he didn't pass away.
He was killed."
He didn't pass away.
They let him die.
And they need to be
held accountable.
And there we go. See?
I was a former drug rep who helped shape the Zoloft marketplace,
which was the S.S.R.I. marketplace in the early '90s.
It was a blockbuster market.
It was huge.
I mean,
every drug in that market did over $1 billion.
Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft,
Celexa, Lexapro.
So I've been tracking that market for a couple of decades on and off.
Years ago, I met a psychiatrist
who got consulted at the zoo...
to treat a particular
young bonobo chimp...
who was injuring himself.
And it got to a point where it was almost a matter of life and death.
So that's why they called in
this psychiatrist,
'cause they wanted him
for a prescription.
They wanted a psychiatric medication beyond what they normally use.
So he wrote a script for Paxil
to reduce his anxiety,
to help with
the O.C.D. behavior.
The young male chimp
stopped hurting himself,
lost his anxiety,
was resocialized.
He's part of the troop.
He's in line to be an alpha male at some point.
So you could say it's an incredible success story,
but it was how he envisioned Paxil being used in his human patients--
medication plus
psychodynamic intervention.
He was able to do it
with the bonobos.
It's easy to say, you know,
we're a world on drugs,
and specifically,
we're becoming a world on psychiatric medication.
I mean, that's indisputable.
Even if you looked at primates
in institutions--
Human and apes,
they develop certain psychopathologies that are very common.
I mean, if you go
across the street here,
there's a county-run
mental facility...
with human primates
on a lot of medications.
But there's
interesting differences.
They're trying to get everyone
out of that institution...
on heavy-duty drugs
and polypharmacy,
and they don't have
a lot of success.
Many times,
people end up there...
because they want
to be institutionalized.
They don't want to be deinstitutionalized at that particular moment.
They're scared. They're frightened.
They have no social support.
They don't know how
to take care of themselves.
They realize that their psychiatric symptoms are overwhelming them.
But the whole push
at those institutions...
is to get them medicated,
short-term stay, pharm 'em out.
They have people
checking in on them,
but not a lot of "socialness,"
not a lot of care--
A lot of pharmaceuticals,
maybe cash to survive in our economy.
Then you come across the street.
You're at the zoo with your great apes,
and if they have psychological issues or psychiatric problems,
they're addressed immediately.
It's a fine-tuned approach.
They incorporate the same
psychiatric methodology...
and psychiatric thinking
and styles of care,
and they often get
the right results...
within an institutional setting.
We're in the bigfoot museum.
And Michael and I have
lived here for a year.
It's the overall "ah"
in the background.
Almost to the day.
Claimed to have seen some...
and had some experiences
with invisible Bigfoot.
She actually
explained in her book--
I love my man,
but gosh darn it,
I want a little break
from Bigfoot.
This is the sound
of the Sasquatch.
There's definitely a Bigfoot
that lives in people's minds.
Where the difference is between what goes
on in your mind and what goes on in reality,
I don't think we've got that
all figured out yet.
My brain is a beast.
I am severely bipolar.
They call it bipolar rapid cycling borderline schizophrenia.
Bipolar disorder creates noise
in your brain that is constant.
Voices come from this way,
and voices come from that way.
And it's really like
being possessed by Satan.
The nuances of mental illness
require the nuances...
of different medications
to tone down the mania,
because when I go off manic,
it is tornado.
This is
Seroquel Extended Release...
um, that I take at night.
This is Depakote,
which I take twice a day.
Abilify for depression.
Docusate sodium so I can poop.
Nuvigil, Ambien,
Cymbalta, Simvastatin,
Lorazepam, Lortab, Zoloft,
Seroquel Extended Release again,
aspirin, marijuana.
So that's it.
How many actual pills
do I take a day?
About 20...
or more.
This is the healthiest I have been ever both mentally and physically.
The drugs are doing
their thing.
And they're working.
It's rare that I give in
to any of the side effects,
although I have them
every day.
All right.
I'm from Iowa City, Iowa.
I was born and raised here.
Joined the Iowa National Guard
when I was 17 years old...
as a medic
with the 109th Medical Company.
I figured, you know,
if I'm a medic,
I'm probably not gonna be fighting people,
you know? I'm gonna be helping people.
I was just really
into everything...
that the Bush Administration
was putting out there.
And so... two days after I turned 17,
I joined the National Guard,
'cause it's the earliest
I could join.
All right,
I'd say it's go time.
I found out right before I left that I was
gonna be stationed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
I never in my life thought I would work in a prison facility,
especially not one that was
notorious for abuse and torture.
I was so young
when I was there,
and I was so afraid,
and I wanted to get home so badly...
that I just tried to do
what I was ordered to do...
and, I guess, just deal with it
when I got home,
and it-it's been pretty rough.
I knew I had a problem
when I got home--
ruining relationships,
getting into legal trouble.
And I knew I was drinking to try to forget the things that had happened.
And I showed up at the V.A.,
made an appointment,
and they diagnosed me
with P.T.S.D....
and put me on Zoloft
and Hydroxyzine that day.
That's all the shit
I haven't taken here.
I was taking this shit,
you know.
The V.A. has these contracts...
with certain
pharmaceutical companies,
and if there's a medication
that can help you...
or even maybe save your life,
you might not get that medication.
So then they use
other medications...
for uses that they aren't
really intended for...
just 'cause they don't have
as big of a selection.
If I saw a normal doctor
if I had health insurance,
if I could afford it, dude,
like, I wouldn't have to deal with this crap...
and having to pick
from this selection...
of, you know,
who they have their deals with.
I really don't know
what's working.
The stuff that haunts me the most is just the memories.
I have nightmares every single night,
and you wake up sweating.
They're impacting right there!
Hey, let's go!
They're impacting!
It's hard to explain
to people...
that at a certain point in time,
you have such extreme anxiety...
that you don't even know
what to do.
You're pacing. You're crying.
You're throwing up.
There's Andy up there.
Andy, take the video.
We're, uh--
Eventually, it just
becomes overwhelming...
for friends and family members.
You just feel you've given
so much of yourself...
and got so little in return except for all these problems.
I don't need medication.
I need help.
I need somebody to listen to me,
to talk to me.
If they want
to give me medication,
give me medication
that works.
God has a prescription.
And inside man,
locked up in his spine,
is 10,000 deadly diseases
locked up in cells.
And every time you go
outside of the boundaries,
of the prescription that life
is supposed to be about,
God releases one of those deadly diseases or germs into your system...
as a warning that something is wrong that needs to be corrected.
You see what I mean?
Salvation is to be healthy...
so that you can be
in tune with God and happy.
My ideology is that
I'm going to get as pure...
as I possibly can
before I die.
Drug-free,
doing the right thing,
so when I meet my maker
that I believe in,
I'll get a little bit
of paradise.
I'm writing this book.
It's called Tales from the Script.
And it's kind of just assessing
the last 20 years...
of how the industry gets doctors
to write prescriptions.
It's sort of a simple question,
but I think it's complex once you start to unravel it.
And I do this chapter
where I talk about,
well, what anthropologists do
is a lot like what drug reps do.
You know, we have to do reconnaissance.
We have to build relationships.
It's all for different reasons,
you know.
One is sort of gaining knowledge and insight to help people, hopefully,
and the other, you know,
is to make a buck.
From a drug rep's point of view,
you have to go where the scripts are being written,
and they're gonna be written
in this building.
And this is where they happen
to keep their samples.
Might come in and assess.
This is my product.
I'm gonna get this one
nice and high.
I'm gonna put my competition, like,
over here, so you put it down there.
I might even just throw it in the corner...
depending on how mad I was.
And then I'd put my sample
of Zoloft right here.
That's probably gonna stay there
for a while...
till maybe my competition comes and goes, "Oh,
the Pfizer rep was here again."
Put this back up here.
We're gonna get things back to normal.
These are the little games you play.
It's neurotic drug rep stuff.
At the same time,
I'm sending anonymous mailers on Zoloft,
whether approved
or unapproved.
I'm leaving Zoloft
file cards everywhere.
What I'm trying to do is over,
like, a three-month period,
make sort of--
kind of make it seem...
like it's naturally occurring
that Zoloft is a big deal,
that Zoloft is
the new drug to be using.
I think many reps know
that doctors think...
about what they do
in terms of cases,
so if you can get a physician
talking about a case,
they start to sell themselves.
Let's say Dr. "W"
comes up to me and I say,
"Hey, how is Zoloft working for you?"
And he says, "It's good."
I say,
"You're using it for depression in your patients?"
"Of course.
It's indicated for depression."
I say, "You using it anywhere else?"
Now, I've done nothing illegal.
Now, let's say by chance,
Dr. "W" says,
"Well, you know,
I do use it for some patients with panic disorder."
That's an off-label use
of the drug.
I say, "Well, I got
your signature for samples.
"Would you like
some clinical information...
on what you just told me
you were using Zoloft for?"
"Sure." Then officially,
I can put his name in the computer.
Our medical department can send
all these articles...
on using Zoloft
for panic disorder,
which, at the time, is illegal.
I never did one thing wrong.
I didn't mention it
for off-label.
I didn't do anything.
I just asked him, you know,
some questions.
That was legal, and that's
what we were trained to do.
You know, at least
that's the way I did it.
Your time's done.
You're onto the next call.
Now, there might be a rep out here.
Sometimes there is.
This is a pharmaceutical rep
who's here, probably. Yes?
Yes or no?
Okay, so they don't talk
to anybody.
Ah, she was terrified.
I felt it for her.
In a way, I actually feel sorry
for drug reps,
because they've been kind of
cast as the problem.
They're sort of the mediator
between medicine and the market.
And the sad thing for reps is,
they're told over and over...
they're delivering a message
of good clinical science.
I don't begrudge drug reps.
I mean, they're nice people.
They're hard workers
for the most part.
Unless they've had their epiphany or
they're hyper-reflexive on what they do,
they think they're doing
a good job.
I worked with some that thought
they were doing God's work.
They looked at it as a vocation.
So, you know,
it's interesting.
There's kind of a religiosity
to being a drug rep...
in terms of believing that you are doing some good work...
educating doctors with these available products you have--
That they're
missing something.
In retrospect,
you do see it more for what it was,
you know, which is
sort of this, um,
really, a business branding model applied to health care,
really, almost at all costs.
But, um, no one ever shouted,
"That's unethical,"
until the end, you know,
until I was almost done,
you know, that I realized,
"Wow, you know,
what we're doing here is really sort of shady."
I think I spent a lot more time
in the system...
than most people would have.
I was adopted
by American parents...
and had a lot
of behavioral issues...
and ended up in a group home.
I was on Ritalin
a good six years.
I think any kid could have
a problem with that.
But what's done is done.
Here's all my childhood stuff
just this box here,
stuff I hang onto,
family photographs.
Being in a clinical
research study...
was pretty much no different
than being in a group home.
You have all that structure.
You're told what to do, when to do it.
But then when I'm not
in a study,
I'm in a territory
that I'm not comfortable with.
You know, I feel lost
half the time.
Lately I've been thinking this whole town is just built on death,
'cause it's a giant hospital.
People fly from all over just
to come here to die pretty much,
you know?
There's people dying everywhere,
though, but--
They definitely make money
off of it here.
Okay, thanks.
Please, don't.
Get out of here.
Sickness is the glue that holds
this place together.
Without the Mayo Clinic,
without the sickness,
it would be another small,
dying, Midwest town.
The primary reason why many
young people are here...
are for the sole purpose of their family working at Mayo Clinic.
I've been prescribed
Adderall, Hydrocodone--
Zoloft and Paxil and--
Ritalin, Paxil.
That was fun.
I've taken every amount of fucking antidepressants you can ever imagine.
None of them worked.
- Prozac--
- Adderall most definitely.
- Adderall and Ritalin.
- Adderall--
Wellbutrin for smoking cigarettes and trying to quit,
which never happened,
obviously.
I just got prescribed Percocet, Nexium, Prilosec. Um--
- What else?
- Seroquel--
- Seroquel.
- Zoloft.
- Lithium--
- Valium, Percocet.
- Oxycontin.
- Effexor, Benztropine, and Abilify.
All those S.S.R.I.'s
or whatever they are--
serotonin "ip-tup-take" inhibit-- whatever they are--
I don't know.
Whatever. Fucking--
I don't know the names of
the things I've been prescribed,
I guess, is my problem.
Robert, now, you record
your experiences...
in this newsletter which is entitled-- I'll hold it up.
It's called the-- I'm guessing.
Is that right? The Guinea Pig Zero?
- Correct, Guinea Pig Zero.
- Explain the title.
I, uh, write about the history
of human experiments...
and news stories
about sometimes abuses...
and things that go wrong
in the experiments.
So not only do you do
the experiment...
but you're the investigative journalist as well within the industry.
- You could say that.
- I-- Keeping them honest. Keeping them honest.
'Cause they have to be.
'Cause the guinea pigs themselves can't do it.
Well, they all doped up.
Nope.
I'm gonna take my pill.
This is Adderall.
One day I decided I had A.D.H.D.
That's a person who gets more work
done when they take amphetamines.
It's the scientific definition.
This is a humane animal trap.
This is for
a fairly small animal...
like a possum or a raccoon
or a cat, a stray cat.
And I got it...
so that I could catch animals...
on the idea
that I might eat them.
And I wanted to be ready
to know how to get food,
get meat on the table.
It was because I had no money,
and it was because I'm over the age of 45,
and that's the cut-off date
for drug experiments.
When there's no money,
there's no money.
So you have to do something
that doesn't cost anything.
In my little world,
part of the complexity is...
that I take a drug to help me continue my writing and research,
and I also have a lot
of problems with the way...
the drug manufacturers go about their
business and make fantastic profits.
My work helps to address some of the contradictions in my life.
It has a healing effect on the world,
I think, in some modest degree.
And the Adderall has helped me
produce my writing.
The relationship
is not complicated to me.
It just works.
This has been an educated trial.
All the doctors that I am seeing
do not stay on top of my drugs,
and it's a good thing
that I do.
I'm my own case manager.
It's true.
Keeps me on my toes.
I can see how right now she
would feel really strongly...
that she's doing
the right thing.
Of course,
a lot of the medicine she takes have these side effects.
Always mitigating symptoms,
but not dealing really directly
with the problem necessarily.
That's the way it seems to me
a lot of the time.
I did get hospitalized
for polypharmacy.
All kinds of weird drugs
were prescribed,
and I got very sick
and had to be hospitalized.
That took two weeks to detox.
And then they started me on
a whole different pile of drugs.
I was watching it happen
and saying to myself,
"This doesn't seem right."
Especially when one of
her doctors refused to see her,
and yet he was still giving her
psychotropic drugs...
but not monitoring her with it,
which, you know--
I was under the impression
that was-- that was wrong.
That's polypharmacy
in a nutshell.
I could've died.
Duffy, are you nervous?
What do you think about this?
I'm scared.
What I did in Iraq
is not what I imagined...
I would be doing
when I enlisted in the army.
There's their makeshift mosque
out of our tents.
My first impression
of Abu Ghraib prison was,
"This looks like
a concentration camp."
I didn't know
who I should be watching,
what I should be doing,
how I should be conducting myself.
I didn't know
how I made it there.
Very overwhelming for a 19 and 20-year-old kid to be around,
to be in charge of whether
somebody lives or dies.
Get it done, retard!
I would never act like I did
at Abu Ghraib prison...
in normal life--
never, ever.
They way we were using
medicine there...
was to get at the prisoners
and break them down.
Instead of treating people,
it was almost like...
we were punishing them
for seeking treatment from us.
I mean, when I'm ordered to
give somebody a 14-gauge needle,
especially if they're not
in a massive trauma,
I know
that that's not needed.
I know that that's
purely to inflict pain.
And that was explicitly
explained to me...
by the officer in charge as,
"Give these guys
14-gauge needles.
"They won't want I.V.'s anymore,
'cause they're so huge and they're so painful."
Usually the prisoners are crying and wailing and screaming at you...
when you're doing this.
There's nothing to feel good about sticking a
14-gauge I.V. in somebody for no good reason.
I couldn't take doing that
to those people anymore.
I'm sure there was other people who also felt the same way as I did,
but Abu Ghraib Prison was not the place you spoke out against--
against any type of practices
there whatsoever.
When Dan died, he didn't
leave much of a suicide note.
He simply wrote, "I leave
this experience smiling."
That's all he wrote.
You know, doing it
all over again,
you know, I don't know what
I could've done differently.
I mean, for heaven sakes,
I didn't want him in the study.
It was not important at all
how Dan was doing.
If it were important how he was doing,
they would've contacted me...
after we contacted them
on Good Friday and said,
"Do we have to wait for him
to kill himself?"
And we did.
We had to wait for that.
I called the coroner
the Monday after he died.
I said I wanted to see him.
And I remember her kind of
yelling at me and saying,
"Well, don't you know
how he died?"
And I said,
"Well, evidently, I don't."
And I didn't.
You know,
I-- When you find out your son kills himself,
you don't say,
"Oh, what did he do?"
No, I didn't know.
But it wasn't a normal suicide.
He slit his throat so badly...
that the coroner's office said
he almost decapitated himself.
And then she said probably because he wasn't dying fast enough,
that he slit his abdomen open...
and reached his hand inside,
and she said
when they found him,
his one hand had
the box cutter frozen in it,
and the other hand was inside his abdomen up to his wrist.
And, you know,
I want people to know...
this is what the drugs do.
If Dan simply wanted
to kill himself...
he wouldn't have done that.
Sunday is a big day.
Getting hitched.
Tying the old knot.
This whole wedding was paid for
by medical studies.
Yeah, this is what $7,000 worth
of a med study looks like.
Jordan likes to be
really independent,
and I love him for that,
that he-- you know,
he's able to do these things
that are ultimately dangerous...
to avoid
having to do a 9:00 to 5:00.
We still keep it in the space of not doing really major studies...
that can have
big problems later.
So for now, you know,
it's Jordan doing medical studies,
and I'm going to school in January and getting a job.
This is what happens
when you grow up, I guess.
That's perfect.
Somebody did the weather
for everybody,
'cause you couldn't get
a more beautiful day than today.
Pleased to meet you, sir.
Oh, my goodness.
What in--
I call that
authentic body piercing.
Everyone is always waiting
for that one person...
who makes
their lives complete.
You are hands-down
the most amazing person...
I have ever met
in my entire life.
I love you.
I was awake for hours trying
to write the perfect vows.
Perfect vows to express how quickly I fell in love with you,
how glad I am about who you've helped me become as a person.
And how crazy in love
I am with you...
and will be for
the rest of our lives.
You're fine.
Hi.
What I do as a historian is...
look into the way
the poorer people...
have been exploited
and brutalized and abused...
by the people in power...
and the people
with money.
This includes these people
who are on the margins.
And it includes
human guinea pigs.
This is a history that hasn't
been told thoroughly enough.
And there are lot of stories
that are important...
that haven't been
brought to light...
and that haven't
been explored.
It's an act of solidarity with those who have come before you...
and with those
who come after you.
You light a torch,
and then you pass it on to another person.
At the end of the day,
somebody has light in their mind...
that they might not have had if it weren't for you yourself...
passing the torch.
I'm proud of it.
Fuck.
Many people that are
in psychiatric distress...
can especially benefit from the acute use of psychiatric medication.
I don't think we need
to question that.
But you also have this whole other part of society...
that is using/abusing
psychiatric medication,
and you can put the medical field in there, too,
because they're the enablers.
In the '90s, if you told
a family practice doctor,
"In ten years,
you will write a ton of prescriptions every month...
for atypical antipsychotics,"
they might laugh at you.
Now primary care
are writing atypicals...
for add-on therapy
for depression,
anger management,
O.D.D., anxiety disorders.
They're just being used
for everything.
The market is being saturated
with them,
but most importantly
by primary care.
That's-- I think that's the most important
thing that pharma has figured out.
I'm tracking a case
about a psychiatrist...
who claims that a major part
of her job now is detox.
She has patients who come in
on a cocktail of medications...
from one primary care doctor who
thinks he's an expert on bipolar disorder.
She gets the patient,
and she says...
they're on all
the wrong medications.
They're not bipolar.
They're depressed.
And then her job is to titrate the patient off these medications,
get them on perhaps
one medication for depression.
This is a future of psychiatry
we could think about,
which is, psychiatry is detox.
Psychiatry more and more,
they're dealing with the polypharmacy generated by primary care,
and in this case,
they ask the question,
"Why are primary care doctors writing all these atypical antipsychotics?"
We have millions of people that are being
prescribed psychiatric medications...
sometimes appropriate use,
but a large part of that population is
being prescribed psychiatric medication...
where it may not be warranted
or indicated.
But it's in demand.
I think how the V.A. system
is set up right now,
you don't have to be going to therapy to get the drugs.
They'll prescribe you
the medication.
If you want therapy,
they film the entire session,
which is
extremely uncomfortable,
and they have a set program
for P.T.S.D....
that just simply...
doesn't work.
There's really no continuity
to your care,
because a lot of these guys
are residents,
and you might see them
once or twice.
And so they don't know what you've even been on half the time,
so they try to give you the same drugs that have already failed for you.
P.T.S.D. is not a new thing.
It's been around forever.
And I think they should be a little slower to just hand you drugs,
say,
"I hope these work for you,"
send you out the door...
than pursue even, like,
alternate therapy treatments that could work for people.
It's hard to let go
of the military.
It's still hard to let go
of the military for me.
I mean, I miss my friends.
I miss my buddies.
I miss helping people out
as a medic.
But now I have the support
of soldiers that are for peace.
I get the support here
from Veterans for Peace...
and Iraq Veterans against the War that I don't get at the V.A.
People seem to truly care
about me.
It's anxiety-inducing,
but at the same time,
it's also very rewarding to finally be able to open up more...
than I would to any psychologist
or anything.
They're there for me.
If I go into
a panic-attack type state,
you know, I have
a supportive environment.
I don't need to turn
to benzodiazepine.
You know, I don't have
to take a Xanax.
I don't have to pop a Klonopin
to calm myself down.
I have someone that's
right there next to me...
that has been where I've been,
dealt with the same problems,
often times dealt
with them longer,
and knows exactly
what to do and to say...
to try to pull me back in
and get back to myself.
It's too easy to sit
in your house...
and pop pills
and drink alcohol.
It's much harder to step out
in the real world...
and try to right the wrongs
that I feel I've done to people.
I guess I kind of started
getting tattoos...
because it was, like,
something nobody could take away from me, you know?
Go through a little pain
getting some nice tattoos...
and release a little pain
at the same time, I guess.
A lot of people who do studies
seem to like to gamble.
I mean,
I'm playing for the one chance that I might hit it big.
Just a money issue.
Either I don't have the money
or I don't have enough.
In the past I've had a lot
more issues with gambling...
where I would not pay my bills
that I should be paying.
But I didn't have any support
from my parents,
and I really didn't have
any support from anywhere else,
so I basically dropped out there into the world...
and made a lot of mistakes.
I lost a really good job.
I was a bus driver for a while.
That kind of snowballed
into not paying my rent...
and not making car payments.
So eventually,
I ended up homeless.
I mean, it was not a good time
in my life.
So that's, like, one
of those dirty things,
like, once I--
once you've experienced
homelessness,
you just never really
get over it.
It has been an issue, like,
in the last few years...
where I'd rather go to Vegas
and piss away some money...
just knowing that I can survive till the next study on the street.
If that were to ever dissipate,
I'm not really sure where I'd end up.
Been a downhill spiral.
But... it's money
I can afford to lose.
Tomorrow I'm gonna go back
to Austin.
I'm looking for
my next study, but--
Just slim pickings
at the moment.
Sometimes when I go home
from Vegas, it's--
I know what
I'm going home to--
the streets.
Did you hear it?
Do you hear the cricket?
It's been over seven years,
and I don't know where the years went.
I don't think there is a minute that goes by that I don't think of him.
I have his ashes.
Yeah, I have some in here.
Yes, he is
right by my heart.
Sometimes I almost feel as
though he should talk to me.
And tell me where you are.
Wherever Dan is,
I know that he is well...
and it is a place for him
of peace.
And sometimes I think
that no human being...
will ever have total peace.
I mean,
every life has problems.
But I think after we're gone on,
we've gone on to another place.
I think
all these worries dissolve.
And it's like at that point,
we don't have an age.
We're just who we are...
and who we were
meant to be.
Holmesburg was a-- a mean experience,
you know? I was lost.
And that's when
I first found Islam.
It changed my life.
Dr. Kligman--
just recently passed away.
God rest his soul
if he can,
'cause all the corrupt things he did-- his sins is on him.
If he has forgiveness coming to him,
he's gonna get it.
You know, that's-- that's it.
That's the way forgiveness go.
Allah's the one
who's got to forgive him.
You know? Yeah.
I mean, I feel hurt
that he coerced us...
to believe that
those tests was safe.
You see,
I feel hurt that he did that for the sake of money.
But, uh, Allah heals wounds.
Allah heals wounds, you know?
You need that.
Everybody need
a shot of Islam,
not a shot of alcohol
or a shot of drugs.
You see what I'm saying?
You have the rope of Allah
to hold on to.
I do pray for health,
and I do pray over the medicine
so that it's doing its job,
and I can get away
with less and less.
Hello?
Bill collector.
It's a good thing
I'm not depressed...
or I would have a hell
of a weaponry pile right here.
And that's the way it's done...
every day.
I wish I wasn't mentally ill.
I mean, it's the pits.
God's grace is amazing.
And His grace never ends.
We're constantly
being drenched in it.
I love my Lord so much.
* The splendor of the King
* Clothed in majesty
* Let all the earth rejoice
* Let all the earth rejoice
* How great is our God
* Sing with me
How great is our God *
* All will see how great
* How great is our God
* How great is our God
* Sing with me
How great is our God *
* All will see how great
* How great *
And long story short,
I take drugs for a living.
Human drug testing.
When a lot of people
see my scars,
they think I'm a drug user,
kind of think
they're, like, track marks...
for, uh,
injecting heroin, but--
After they get about 100 needles in there,
it's gonna leave a mark.
That's for damn sure.
And I've been in studies...
where we had 100 sticks
in, like, 14 days.
That's a lot more traffic than I like going through my veins.
I mean, that's what
I'm being paid to do.
I'm being paid to be poked,
prodded, uh, tested.
And if I didn't want to do that,
I wouldn't be here doing it.
I have to believe that I'm doing something to help out society.
I could be saving the lives
of many people.
But do I really believe that?
It's hard to.
Compared to what we have.
And when you look for mascara,
look for--
Output is a wall--
My name is Robert Helms,
and I am a professional
guinea pig.
There's a take/take relationship between
me and the pharmaceutical companies.
My name is Robert Helms,
and I am a professional guinea pig.
They need bodies to do
the testing, and I need money.
So, uh, no, I don't
have any moral qualms.
My name is Robert Helms,
and I'm a professional guinea pig.
The real Robert Helms
makes his living...
as a human guinea pig
for scientific exper--
When you're a guinea pig,
you have to fit the description
they're looking for.
You have to be drug-free,
and you have to pass a medical screening,
and the only way to consistently
do that over and over is to lie.
To Tell the Truth.
Now let's meet our panelists.
If you say you've got anything
wrong in your medical history,
you're going to be less likely
to get the job...
than the next guy in line
who's very consistently lying.
Number three, d-did
something happen to you...
that made you want to do
something like this?
The doctor who examines you
knows that you're lying,
but when I lie to them,
I'm only lying so I can get work, which I need.
Okay, number two,
how much do you make for doing something like this?
Up to something
like $350 a day.
Now, how that plays into determining
whether the drug is safe and effective,
that's not my work.
Number two or number three?
It's time to find out now
which one of our players...
is the real human guinea pig.
Will the real Robert Helms
please stand up?
If I'm lying,
I'm lying for pennies.
This is not a mansion
you're looking at here.
This is a rented room
where I and my cats live.
When they lie,
they're lying so that they can make billions of dollars...
over the course of many years while they have the patent on the drug.
They have an agenda
to prescribe these drugs...
to as many people as possible.
It's their agenda
inside your body.
They want to make money,
and they have to use healthy guinea pigs...
in the regular society.
They're not able to use prisoners anymore.
They wish they could.
This is Holmesburg prison here.
This is where I served time at
from 1964 to 1966.
I was in for sales
of marijuana.
This is my first time there.
I'm scared, young-- 20 years old.
When I first got in there,
I seen all these inmates walking around...
with bandages
all over their bodies.
I found out these guys was on tests from the University of Pennsylvania...
under Dr. Albert Kligman.
And at first,
they were minor tests,
you know,
like a Johnson & Johnson bubble bath test.
And at the time,
it was paying something like 30-something dollars.
So I said, "Put me on that."
But it wasn't the bubble bath.
The people was crooked in the hospital.
They sprayed this stuff on my back that
had all these deadly chemicals in it...
that went
into my bloodstream.
I start breaking out with these little red,
pustular bumps all over my body.
My hands and feet got that big.
One finger was that fat.
This stuff here on my fingers,
they are constantly itchy,
burning.
I scratch them till they bleed.
I have prostate cancer,
degenerative rheumatoid arthritis and hepatitis C.
Bubble bath does this
to somebody, man?
Dr. Kligman didn't look at us
as human beings.
He looked at us as
a commodity...
or a number or skin
to experiment on.
You know, sure enough,
guinea pigs.
Now, I got on the other test,
uh, taking pills.
I had to take seven pills
three times a day.
But they did a job on me.
They dehydrated my intestines.
They locked my bowels.
And they're taking me in the back of Holmesburg and butchered me.
They butchered me back there.
These tests, man, was something
that should've never been.
You doing time in there.
That's part of your life missing.
That's penalty enough.
I'm damaged, man.
I'm damaged goods...
from getting
into things blindly,
not knowing what I was
really doing to myself,
and they knew.
They knew.
They knew exactly.
They coerced us to believe
that the testing was safe.
You can destroy your life
taking stuff into your system.
It's gonna come back to haunt you, man,
you know?
And that's the way life is,
you know?
All right, man.
Let's get out of here, man.
It's getting late.
I got to get up in the morning and go to the clinic.
Follow that light, Jack.
Been doing med studies for...
two,
going on three years now,
I believe.
Doing a study to pay
for my wedding.
Met my fiancée hopping
freight trains,
and, uh, we've been together
ever since.
And now we're trying
to save up money,
trying to start a family here
pretty soon hopefully...
and get the heck
out of here.
Here's Laura
when I first met her.
I got pictures of her
all over.
We even
each other out.
Yeah, we're good--
good balance.
I've always done kind of odd-job
stuff for medical studies.
I can help you get
on a freight train...
or hitchhike wherever
in a couple days,
but I'd like a home,
and you need a steady income for that.
I'm worried about money now,
you know?
It's just--
I hate money.
Yup.
Dollar bills.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dan always looked into things
very, very deeply--
much too deeply.
And I do think that did contribute to his mental illness.
He didn't laugh things off.
I wish he had.
This was his college graduation in 2000.
And a birthday card
that he made for me.
I think he was probably
about seven.
And he says everybody
is smiling, but no,
everybody is
not smiling anymore.
Dan became ill,
and I got him into
Fairview Riverside Hospital...
in Minneapolis
in November of 2003.
And within a few days,
he was put into a clinical study...
that was run by his attending physician,
Dr. Stephen C. Olson.
He was
his attending physician...
and also the principal investigator in the clinical study.
It's an obvious
conflict of interest.
Dan had the choice of either
going into the study...
or going into a mental hospital.
He chose the study.
Dr. Olson had control
over Dan's freedom.
He was taken off
his treatment medication...
and put on the study medication,
which turned out to be Seroquel.
These clinical studies are marketing ploys
for the pharmaceutical companies...
on drugs that were approved
over a dozen years ago...
and should no longer
have to be studied.
I had no one else to turn to.
You know, we had tried
for everyone to help us.
Because Dan was of legal age,
I had no way of getting him out of the study,
you know,
other than pleading with the doctors to let him out,
which they would not.
It was obvious he was deteriorating by his demeanor.
He was losing a lot of weight,
and he was gaunt.
And he felt he was being
plagued by devils.
He was--
psychotic.
I told Dr. Olson,
"I know my son."
I said,
"I see this inner rage.
Please, don't let it
come boiling out."
Which it did.
And I can still remember
Father O'Hotto saying that,
"Your son passed away."
And...
I remember thinking,
"Oh, how ridiculous.
No, he didn't pass away.
He was killed."
He didn't pass away.
They let him die.
And they need to be
held accountable.
And there we go. See?
I was a former drug rep who helped shape the Zoloft marketplace,
which was the S.S.R.I. marketplace in the early '90s.
It was a blockbuster market.
It was huge.
I mean,
every drug in that market did over $1 billion.
Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft,
Celexa, Lexapro.
So I've been tracking that market for a couple of decades on and off.
Years ago, I met a psychiatrist
who got consulted at the zoo...
to treat a particular
young bonobo chimp...
who was injuring himself.
And it got to a point where it was almost a matter of life and death.
So that's why they called in
this psychiatrist,
'cause they wanted him
for a prescription.
They wanted a psychiatric medication beyond what they normally use.
So he wrote a script for Paxil
to reduce his anxiety,
to help with
the O.C.D. behavior.
The young male chimp
stopped hurting himself,
lost his anxiety,
was resocialized.
He's part of the troop.
He's in line to be an alpha male at some point.
So you could say it's an incredible success story,
but it was how he envisioned Paxil being used in his human patients--
medication plus
psychodynamic intervention.
He was able to do it
with the bonobos.
It's easy to say, you know,
we're a world on drugs,
and specifically,
we're becoming a world on psychiatric medication.
I mean, that's indisputable.
Even if you looked at primates
in institutions--
Human and apes,
they develop certain psychopathologies that are very common.
I mean, if you go
across the street here,
there's a county-run
mental facility...
with human primates
on a lot of medications.
But there's
interesting differences.
They're trying to get everyone
out of that institution...
on heavy-duty drugs
and polypharmacy,
and they don't have
a lot of success.
Many times,
people end up there...
because they want
to be institutionalized.
They don't want to be deinstitutionalized at that particular moment.
They're scared. They're frightened.
They have no social support.
They don't know how
to take care of themselves.
They realize that their psychiatric symptoms are overwhelming them.
But the whole push
at those institutions...
is to get them medicated,
short-term stay, pharm 'em out.
They have people
checking in on them,
but not a lot of "socialness,"
not a lot of care--
A lot of pharmaceuticals,
maybe cash to survive in our economy.
Then you come across the street.
You're at the zoo with your great apes,
and if they have psychological issues or psychiatric problems,
they're addressed immediately.
It's a fine-tuned approach.
They incorporate the same
psychiatric methodology...
and psychiatric thinking
and styles of care,
and they often get
the right results...
within an institutional setting.
We're in the bigfoot museum.
And Michael and I have
lived here for a year.
It's the overall "ah"
in the background.
Almost to the day.
Claimed to have seen some...
and had some experiences
with invisible Bigfoot.
She actually
explained in her book--
I love my man,
but gosh darn it,
I want a little break
from Bigfoot.
This is the sound
of the Sasquatch.
There's definitely a Bigfoot
that lives in people's minds.
Where the difference is between what goes
on in your mind and what goes on in reality,
I don't think we've got that
all figured out yet.
My brain is a beast.
I am severely bipolar.
They call it bipolar rapid cycling borderline schizophrenia.
Bipolar disorder creates noise
in your brain that is constant.
Voices come from this way,
and voices come from that way.
And it's really like
being possessed by Satan.
The nuances of mental illness
require the nuances...
of different medications
to tone down the mania,
because when I go off manic,
it is tornado.
This is
Seroquel Extended Release...
um, that I take at night.
This is Depakote,
which I take twice a day.
Abilify for depression.
Docusate sodium so I can poop.
Nuvigil, Ambien,
Cymbalta, Simvastatin,
Lorazepam, Lortab, Zoloft,
Seroquel Extended Release again,
aspirin, marijuana.
So that's it.
How many actual pills
do I take a day?
About 20...
or more.
This is the healthiest I have been ever both mentally and physically.
The drugs are doing
their thing.
And they're working.
It's rare that I give in
to any of the side effects,
although I have them
every day.
All right.
I'm from Iowa City, Iowa.
I was born and raised here.
Joined the Iowa National Guard
when I was 17 years old...
as a medic
with the 109th Medical Company.
I figured, you know,
if I'm a medic,
I'm probably not gonna be fighting people,
you know? I'm gonna be helping people.
I was just really
into everything...
that the Bush Administration
was putting out there.
And so... two days after I turned 17,
I joined the National Guard,
'cause it's the earliest
I could join.
All right,
I'd say it's go time.
I found out right before I left that I was
gonna be stationed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
I never in my life thought I would work in a prison facility,
especially not one that was
notorious for abuse and torture.
I was so young
when I was there,
and I was so afraid,
and I wanted to get home so badly...
that I just tried to do
what I was ordered to do...
and, I guess, just deal with it
when I got home,
and it-it's been pretty rough.
I knew I had a problem
when I got home--
ruining relationships,
getting into legal trouble.
And I knew I was drinking to try to forget the things that had happened.
And I showed up at the V.A.,
made an appointment,
and they diagnosed me
with P.T.S.D....
and put me on Zoloft
and Hydroxyzine that day.
That's all the shit
I haven't taken here.
I was taking this shit,
you know.
The V.A. has these contracts...
with certain
pharmaceutical companies,
and if there's a medication
that can help you...
or even maybe save your life,
you might not get that medication.
So then they use
other medications...
for uses that they aren't
really intended for...
just 'cause they don't have
as big of a selection.
If I saw a normal doctor
if I had health insurance,
if I could afford it, dude,
like, I wouldn't have to deal with this crap...
and having to pick
from this selection...
of, you know,
who they have their deals with.
I really don't know
what's working.
The stuff that haunts me the most is just the memories.
I have nightmares every single night,
and you wake up sweating.
They're impacting right there!
Hey, let's go!
They're impacting!
It's hard to explain
to people...
that at a certain point in time,
you have such extreme anxiety...
that you don't even know
what to do.
You're pacing. You're crying.
You're throwing up.
There's Andy up there.
Andy, take the video.
We're, uh--
Eventually, it just
becomes overwhelming...
for friends and family members.
You just feel you've given
so much of yourself...
and got so little in return except for all these problems.
I don't need medication.
I need help.
I need somebody to listen to me,
to talk to me.
If they want
to give me medication,
give me medication
that works.
God has a prescription.
And inside man,
locked up in his spine,
is 10,000 deadly diseases
locked up in cells.
And every time you go
outside of the boundaries,
of the prescription that life
is supposed to be about,
God releases one of those deadly diseases or germs into your system...
as a warning that something is wrong that needs to be corrected.
You see what I mean?
Salvation is to be healthy...
so that you can be
in tune with God and happy.
My ideology is that
I'm going to get as pure...
as I possibly can
before I die.
Drug-free,
doing the right thing,
so when I meet my maker
that I believe in,
I'll get a little bit
of paradise.
I'm writing this book.
It's called Tales from the Script.
And it's kind of just assessing
the last 20 years...
of how the industry gets doctors
to write prescriptions.
It's sort of a simple question,
but I think it's complex once you start to unravel it.
And I do this chapter
where I talk about,
well, what anthropologists do
is a lot like what drug reps do.
You know, we have to do reconnaissance.
We have to build relationships.
It's all for different reasons,
you know.
One is sort of gaining knowledge and insight to help people, hopefully,
and the other, you know,
is to make a buck.
From a drug rep's point of view,
you have to go where the scripts are being written,
and they're gonna be written
in this building.
And this is where they happen
to keep their samples.
Might come in and assess.
This is my product.
I'm gonna get this one
nice and high.
I'm gonna put my competition, like,
over here, so you put it down there.
I might even just throw it in the corner...
depending on how mad I was.
And then I'd put my sample
of Zoloft right here.
That's probably gonna stay there
for a while...
till maybe my competition comes and goes, "Oh,
the Pfizer rep was here again."
Put this back up here.
We're gonna get things back to normal.
These are the little games you play.
It's neurotic drug rep stuff.
At the same time,
I'm sending anonymous mailers on Zoloft,
whether approved
or unapproved.
I'm leaving Zoloft
file cards everywhere.
What I'm trying to do is over,
like, a three-month period,
make sort of--
kind of make it seem...
like it's naturally occurring
that Zoloft is a big deal,
that Zoloft is
the new drug to be using.
I think many reps know
that doctors think...
about what they do
in terms of cases,
so if you can get a physician
talking about a case,
they start to sell themselves.
Let's say Dr. "W"
comes up to me and I say,
"Hey, how is Zoloft working for you?"
And he says, "It's good."
I say,
"You're using it for depression in your patients?"
"Of course.
It's indicated for depression."
I say, "You using it anywhere else?"
Now, I've done nothing illegal.
Now, let's say by chance,
Dr. "W" says,
"Well, you know,
I do use it for some patients with panic disorder."
That's an off-label use
of the drug.
I say, "Well, I got
your signature for samples.
"Would you like
some clinical information...
on what you just told me
you were using Zoloft for?"
"Sure." Then officially,
I can put his name in the computer.
Our medical department can send
all these articles...
on using Zoloft
for panic disorder,
which, at the time, is illegal.
I never did one thing wrong.
I didn't mention it
for off-label.
I didn't do anything.
I just asked him, you know,
some questions.
That was legal, and that's
what we were trained to do.
You know, at least
that's the way I did it.
Your time's done.
You're onto the next call.
Now, there might be a rep out here.
Sometimes there is.
This is a pharmaceutical rep
who's here, probably. Yes?
Yes or no?
Okay, so they don't talk
to anybody.
Ah, she was terrified.
I felt it for her.
In a way, I actually feel sorry
for drug reps,
because they've been kind of
cast as the problem.
They're sort of the mediator
between medicine and the market.
And the sad thing for reps is,
they're told over and over...
they're delivering a message
of good clinical science.
I don't begrudge drug reps.
I mean, they're nice people.
They're hard workers
for the most part.
Unless they've had their epiphany or
they're hyper-reflexive on what they do,
they think they're doing
a good job.
I worked with some that thought
they were doing God's work.
They looked at it as a vocation.
So, you know,
it's interesting.
There's kind of a religiosity
to being a drug rep...
in terms of believing that you are doing some good work...
educating doctors with these available products you have--
That they're
missing something.
In retrospect,
you do see it more for what it was,
you know, which is
sort of this, um,
really, a business branding model applied to health care,
really, almost at all costs.
But, um, no one ever shouted,
"That's unethical,"
until the end, you know,
until I was almost done,
you know, that I realized,
"Wow, you know,
what we're doing here is really sort of shady."
I think I spent a lot more time
in the system...
than most people would have.
I was adopted
by American parents...
and had a lot
of behavioral issues...
and ended up in a group home.
I was on Ritalin
a good six years.
I think any kid could have
a problem with that.
But what's done is done.
Here's all my childhood stuff
just this box here,
stuff I hang onto,
family photographs.
Being in a clinical
research study...
was pretty much no different
than being in a group home.
You have all that structure.
You're told what to do, when to do it.
But then when I'm not
in a study,
I'm in a territory
that I'm not comfortable with.
You know, I feel lost
half the time.
Lately I've been thinking this whole town is just built on death,
'cause it's a giant hospital.
People fly from all over just
to come here to die pretty much,
you know?
There's people dying everywhere,
though, but--
They definitely make money
off of it here.
Okay, thanks.
Please, don't.
Get out of here.
Sickness is the glue that holds
this place together.
Without the Mayo Clinic,
without the sickness,
it would be another small,
dying, Midwest town.
The primary reason why many
young people are here...
are for the sole purpose of their family working at Mayo Clinic.
I've been prescribed
Adderall, Hydrocodone--
Zoloft and Paxil and--
Ritalin, Paxil.
That was fun.
I've taken every amount of fucking antidepressants you can ever imagine.
None of them worked.
- Prozac--
- Adderall most definitely.
- Adderall and Ritalin.
- Adderall--
Wellbutrin for smoking cigarettes and trying to quit,
which never happened,
obviously.
I just got prescribed Percocet, Nexium, Prilosec. Um--
- What else?
- Seroquel--
- Seroquel.
- Zoloft.
- Lithium--
- Valium, Percocet.
- Oxycontin.
- Effexor, Benztropine, and Abilify.
All those S.S.R.I.'s
or whatever they are--
serotonin "ip-tup-take" inhibit-- whatever they are--
I don't know.
Whatever. Fucking--
I don't know the names of
the things I've been prescribed,
I guess, is my problem.
Robert, now, you record
your experiences...
in this newsletter which is entitled-- I'll hold it up.
It's called the-- I'm guessing.
Is that right? The Guinea Pig Zero?
- Correct, Guinea Pig Zero.
- Explain the title.
I, uh, write about the history
of human experiments...
and news stories
about sometimes abuses...
and things that go wrong
in the experiments.
So not only do you do
the experiment...
but you're the investigative journalist as well within the industry.
- You could say that.
- I-- Keeping them honest. Keeping them honest.
'Cause they have to be.
'Cause the guinea pigs themselves can't do it.
Well, they all doped up.
Nope.
I'm gonna take my pill.
This is Adderall.
One day I decided I had A.D.H.D.
That's a person who gets more work
done when they take amphetamines.
It's the scientific definition.
This is a humane animal trap.
This is for
a fairly small animal...
like a possum or a raccoon
or a cat, a stray cat.
And I got it...
so that I could catch animals...
on the idea
that I might eat them.
And I wanted to be ready
to know how to get food,
get meat on the table.
It was because I had no money,
and it was because I'm over the age of 45,
and that's the cut-off date
for drug experiments.
When there's no money,
there's no money.
So you have to do something
that doesn't cost anything.
In my little world,
part of the complexity is...
that I take a drug to help me continue my writing and research,
and I also have a lot
of problems with the way...
the drug manufacturers go about their
business and make fantastic profits.
My work helps to address some of the contradictions in my life.
It has a healing effect on the world,
I think, in some modest degree.
And the Adderall has helped me
produce my writing.
The relationship
is not complicated to me.
It just works.
This has been an educated trial.
All the doctors that I am seeing
do not stay on top of my drugs,
and it's a good thing
that I do.
I'm my own case manager.
It's true.
Keeps me on my toes.
I can see how right now she
would feel really strongly...
that she's doing
the right thing.
Of course,
a lot of the medicine she takes have these side effects.
Always mitigating symptoms,
but not dealing really directly
with the problem necessarily.
That's the way it seems to me
a lot of the time.
I did get hospitalized
for polypharmacy.
All kinds of weird drugs
were prescribed,
and I got very sick
and had to be hospitalized.
That took two weeks to detox.
And then they started me on
a whole different pile of drugs.
I was watching it happen
and saying to myself,
"This doesn't seem right."
Especially when one of
her doctors refused to see her,
and yet he was still giving her
psychotropic drugs...
but not monitoring her with it,
which, you know--
I was under the impression
that was-- that was wrong.
That's polypharmacy
in a nutshell.
I could've died.
Duffy, are you nervous?
What do you think about this?
I'm scared.
What I did in Iraq
is not what I imagined...
I would be doing
when I enlisted in the army.
There's their makeshift mosque
out of our tents.
My first impression
of Abu Ghraib prison was,
"This looks like
a concentration camp."
I didn't know
who I should be watching,
what I should be doing,
how I should be conducting myself.
I didn't know
how I made it there.
Very overwhelming for a 19 and 20-year-old kid to be around,
to be in charge of whether
somebody lives or dies.
Get it done, retard!
I would never act like I did
at Abu Ghraib prison...
in normal life--
never, ever.
They way we were using
medicine there...
was to get at the prisoners
and break them down.
Instead of treating people,
it was almost like...
we were punishing them
for seeking treatment from us.
I mean, when I'm ordered to
give somebody a 14-gauge needle,
especially if they're not
in a massive trauma,
I know
that that's not needed.
I know that that's
purely to inflict pain.
And that was explicitly
explained to me...
by the officer in charge as,
"Give these guys
14-gauge needles.
"They won't want I.V.'s anymore,
'cause they're so huge and they're so painful."
Usually the prisoners are crying and wailing and screaming at you...
when you're doing this.
There's nothing to feel good about sticking a
14-gauge I.V. in somebody for no good reason.
I couldn't take doing that
to those people anymore.
I'm sure there was other people who also felt the same way as I did,
but Abu Ghraib Prison was not the place you spoke out against--
against any type of practices
there whatsoever.
When Dan died, he didn't
leave much of a suicide note.
He simply wrote, "I leave
this experience smiling."
That's all he wrote.
You know, doing it
all over again,
you know, I don't know what
I could've done differently.
I mean, for heaven sakes,
I didn't want him in the study.
It was not important at all
how Dan was doing.
If it were important how he was doing,
they would've contacted me...
after we contacted them
on Good Friday and said,
"Do we have to wait for him
to kill himself?"
And we did.
We had to wait for that.
I called the coroner
the Monday after he died.
I said I wanted to see him.
And I remember her kind of
yelling at me and saying,
"Well, don't you know
how he died?"
And I said,
"Well, evidently, I don't."
And I didn't.
You know,
I-- When you find out your son kills himself,
you don't say,
"Oh, what did he do?"
No, I didn't know.
But it wasn't a normal suicide.
He slit his throat so badly...
that the coroner's office said
he almost decapitated himself.
And then she said probably because he wasn't dying fast enough,
that he slit his abdomen open...
and reached his hand inside,
and she said
when they found him,
his one hand had
the box cutter frozen in it,
and the other hand was inside his abdomen up to his wrist.
And, you know,
I want people to know...
this is what the drugs do.
If Dan simply wanted
to kill himself...
he wouldn't have done that.
Sunday is a big day.
Getting hitched.
Tying the old knot.
This whole wedding was paid for
by medical studies.
Yeah, this is what $7,000 worth
of a med study looks like.
Jordan likes to be
really independent,
and I love him for that,
that he-- you know,
he's able to do these things
that are ultimately dangerous...
to avoid
having to do a 9:00 to 5:00.
We still keep it in the space of not doing really major studies...
that can have
big problems later.
So for now, you know,
it's Jordan doing medical studies,
and I'm going to school in January and getting a job.
This is what happens
when you grow up, I guess.
That's perfect.
Somebody did the weather
for everybody,
'cause you couldn't get
a more beautiful day than today.
Pleased to meet you, sir.
Oh, my goodness.
What in--
I call that
authentic body piercing.
Everyone is always waiting
for that one person...
who makes
their lives complete.
You are hands-down
the most amazing person...
I have ever met
in my entire life.
I love you.
I was awake for hours trying
to write the perfect vows.
Perfect vows to express how quickly I fell in love with you,
how glad I am about who you've helped me become as a person.
And how crazy in love
I am with you...
and will be for
the rest of our lives.
You're fine.
Hi.
What I do as a historian is...
look into the way
the poorer people...
have been exploited
and brutalized and abused...
by the people in power...
and the people
with money.
This includes these people
who are on the margins.
And it includes
human guinea pigs.
This is a history that hasn't
been told thoroughly enough.
And there are lot of stories
that are important...
that haven't been
brought to light...
and that haven't
been explored.
It's an act of solidarity with those who have come before you...
and with those
who come after you.
You light a torch,
and then you pass it on to another person.
At the end of the day,
somebody has light in their mind...
that they might not have had if it weren't for you yourself...
passing the torch.
I'm proud of it.
Fuck.
Many people that are
in psychiatric distress...
can especially benefit from the acute use of psychiatric medication.
I don't think we need
to question that.
But you also have this whole other part of society...
that is using/abusing
psychiatric medication,
and you can put the medical field in there, too,
because they're the enablers.
In the '90s, if you told
a family practice doctor,
"In ten years,
you will write a ton of prescriptions every month...
for atypical antipsychotics,"
they might laugh at you.
Now primary care
are writing atypicals...
for add-on therapy
for depression,
anger management,
O.D.D., anxiety disorders.
They're just being used
for everything.
The market is being saturated
with them,
but most importantly
by primary care.
That's-- I think that's the most important
thing that pharma has figured out.
I'm tracking a case
about a psychiatrist...
who claims that a major part
of her job now is detox.
She has patients who come in
on a cocktail of medications...
from one primary care doctor who
thinks he's an expert on bipolar disorder.
She gets the patient,
and she says...
they're on all
the wrong medications.
They're not bipolar.
They're depressed.
And then her job is to titrate the patient off these medications,
get them on perhaps
one medication for depression.
This is a future of psychiatry
we could think about,
which is, psychiatry is detox.
Psychiatry more and more,
they're dealing with the polypharmacy generated by primary care,
and in this case,
they ask the question,
"Why are primary care doctors writing all these atypical antipsychotics?"
We have millions of people that are being
prescribed psychiatric medications...
sometimes appropriate use,
but a large part of that population is
being prescribed psychiatric medication...
where it may not be warranted
or indicated.
But it's in demand.
I think how the V.A. system
is set up right now,
you don't have to be going to therapy to get the drugs.
They'll prescribe you
the medication.
If you want therapy,
they film the entire session,
which is
extremely uncomfortable,
and they have a set program
for P.T.S.D....
that just simply...
doesn't work.
There's really no continuity
to your care,
because a lot of these guys
are residents,
and you might see them
once or twice.
And so they don't know what you've even been on half the time,
so they try to give you the same drugs that have already failed for you.
P.T.S.D. is not a new thing.
It's been around forever.
And I think they should be a little slower to just hand you drugs,
say,
"I hope these work for you,"
send you out the door...
than pursue even, like,
alternate therapy treatments that could work for people.
It's hard to let go
of the military.
It's still hard to let go
of the military for me.
I mean, I miss my friends.
I miss my buddies.
I miss helping people out
as a medic.
But now I have the support
of soldiers that are for peace.
I get the support here
from Veterans for Peace...
and Iraq Veterans against the War that I don't get at the V.A.
People seem to truly care
about me.
It's anxiety-inducing,
but at the same time,
it's also very rewarding to finally be able to open up more...
than I would to any psychologist
or anything.
They're there for me.
If I go into
a panic-attack type state,
you know, I have
a supportive environment.
I don't need to turn
to benzodiazepine.
You know, I don't have
to take a Xanax.
I don't have to pop a Klonopin
to calm myself down.
I have someone that's
right there next to me...
that has been where I've been,
dealt with the same problems,
often times dealt
with them longer,
and knows exactly
what to do and to say...
to try to pull me back in
and get back to myself.
It's too easy to sit
in your house...
and pop pills
and drink alcohol.
It's much harder to step out
in the real world...
and try to right the wrongs
that I feel I've done to people.
I guess I kind of started
getting tattoos...
because it was, like,
something nobody could take away from me, you know?
Go through a little pain
getting some nice tattoos...
and release a little pain
at the same time, I guess.
A lot of people who do studies
seem to like to gamble.
I mean,
I'm playing for the one chance that I might hit it big.
Just a money issue.
Either I don't have the money
or I don't have enough.
In the past I've had a lot
more issues with gambling...
where I would not pay my bills
that I should be paying.
But I didn't have any support
from my parents,
and I really didn't have
any support from anywhere else,
so I basically dropped out there into the world...
and made a lot of mistakes.
I lost a really good job.
I was a bus driver for a while.
That kind of snowballed
into not paying my rent...
and not making car payments.
So eventually,
I ended up homeless.
I mean, it was not a good time
in my life.
So that's, like, one
of those dirty things,
like, once I--
once you've experienced
homelessness,
you just never really
get over it.
It has been an issue, like,
in the last few years...
where I'd rather go to Vegas
and piss away some money...
just knowing that I can survive till the next study on the street.
If that were to ever dissipate,
I'm not really sure where I'd end up.
Been a downhill spiral.
But... it's money
I can afford to lose.
Tomorrow I'm gonna go back
to Austin.
I'm looking for
my next study, but--
Just slim pickings
at the moment.
Sometimes when I go home
from Vegas, it's--
I know what
I'm going home to--
the streets.
Did you hear it?
Do you hear the cricket?
It's been over seven years,
and I don't know where the years went.
I don't think there is a minute that goes by that I don't think of him.
I have his ashes.
Yeah, I have some in here.
Yes, he is
right by my heart.
Sometimes I almost feel as
though he should talk to me.
And tell me where you are.
Wherever Dan is,
I know that he is well...
and it is a place for him
of peace.
And sometimes I think
that no human being...
will ever have total peace.
I mean,
every life has problems.
But I think after we're gone on,
we've gone on to another place.
I think
all these worries dissolve.
And it's like at that point,
we don't have an age.
We're just who we are...
and who we were
meant to be.
Holmesburg was a-- a mean experience,
you know? I was lost.
And that's when
I first found Islam.
It changed my life.
Dr. Kligman--
just recently passed away.
God rest his soul
if he can,
'cause all the corrupt things he did-- his sins is on him.
If he has forgiveness coming to him,
he's gonna get it.
You know, that's-- that's it.
That's the way forgiveness go.
Allah's the one
who's got to forgive him.
You know? Yeah.
I mean, I feel hurt
that he coerced us...
to believe that
those tests was safe.
You see,
I feel hurt that he did that for the sake of money.
But, uh, Allah heals wounds.
Allah heals wounds, you know?
You need that.
Everybody need
a shot of Islam,
not a shot of alcohol
or a shot of drugs.
You see what I'm saying?
You have the rope of Allah
to hold on to.
I do pray for health,
and I do pray over the medicine
so that it's doing its job,
and I can get away
with less and less.
Hello?
Bill collector.
It's a good thing
I'm not depressed...
or I would have a hell
of a weaponry pile right here.
And that's the way it's done...
every day.
I wish I wasn't mentally ill.
I mean, it's the pits.
God's grace is amazing.
And His grace never ends.
We're constantly
being drenched in it.
I love my Lord so much.
* The splendor of the King
* Clothed in majesty
* Let all the earth rejoice
* Let all the earth rejoice
* How great is our God
* Sing with me
How great is our God *
* All will see how great
* How great is our God
* How great is our God
* Sing with me
How great is our God *
* All will see how great
* How great *