L’Etang, Hugh. "The Effect of Drugs on Political Decisions." Politics and the Life Sciences 7, 1 (August, 1988):12-17.
Introduction. Chemical developments during the past one hundred years have filled domestic medicine cabinets as well as pharmacies. The widespread availability of medications has clearly transformed life and living in the twentieth century, with the healing benefits of antibiotics and chemotherapy countered by the destructive effects of addictive drugs both old and new. Even those medications prescribed and supervised by physicians are but one of hundreds of factors which may influence human behavior, decision making, and even international affairs. Half-way through this century even a relatively harmless drug was the scapegoat in an American book, The Aspirin Age (Leighton, 1949), whose contributors reviewed the "utterly fantastic news events of the gaudy and chaotic years that separated Versailles and Pearl Harbor."
Too much reliance on medicine has long been regarded as hypochondriacal. Even that staunch socialist Aneurin Bevan, minister of health in the first three years of the British National Health Service, worried no doubt by the rapid increase in drug prescriptions and costs, deplored the philosophy of a pill for every ill.
Medications are now ubiquitous and world leaders are not unique in resorting to nasal decongestants, throat and cough mixtures, pain-killing drugs, indigestion and travel-sickness remedies available without prescription from drugstores. In addition they may well receive potent drugs with adverse side effects prescribed by their own physicians for more serious disorders.
With such widespread exposure to various medicines it is tempting to relate unwise decisions and statements, or even unfortunate television appearances, to one of a battery of medications which any leader may have been found to be taking. Such attributions of cause and effect by enthusiastic medical historians, though tempting, are difficult to prove. The medications may merely be an associated by insignificant factor in a chain of complicated and interrelated events, any of which are more likely to have been the precipitating factors.
This is not to imply that even the supposedly milder medications can be ignored as a cause of unusual behavior. Nasal decongestants or cold cures purchases over-the-counter, and without prescription, from a pharmacist have reportedly lead to suspicion of colleagues supposedly talking in code, of anti-government plots, hallucinations about threatening voices and alarming visual imagery involving spiders (Wharton, 1970).
The remainder of this article will examine several world leaders in order to illustrate how the wide-spread use of medicines and drugs has permeated even the political decision-making elements of contemporary societies.