The Power to Harm
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
On September 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker entered a Louisville, Kentucky printing plant and shot twenty people with an automatic rifle before turning the gun on himself. Wesbecker had been severely depressed and was taking Prozac, and the families of the victims sued Prozac's manufacturer, Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the popular antidepressant had caused Wesbecker's deranged mental state. The resulting trial instigated unprecedented research into the mind of a "spree killer" — and raised provocative questions about the delicate, dangerous balance pharmaceutical companies must oversee between the public good and the bottom line. In this absorbing book, John Cornwell interweaves the Wesbecker trial with a provocative exploration of issues of identity and personality. He takes us beyond the courtroom and into the laboratories and boardrooms of the corporations who daily make life-and-death decisions concerning the public welfare. The result is a timely, compelling look at what it means and what can happen when science gives us the ability to manipulate who we are and how we behave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cornwell (Earth to Earth) reconstructs the story of Joseph Wesbecker, on medical leave from his job in a Louisville, Ky., printing plant, who returned to his workplace in 1989 and shot 20 fellow employees, killing eight of them before killing himself. He also relates the battle by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company to fight the damage suit brought by the survivors of Wesbecker's murder spree and the families of the dead, who alleged that his action had been caused by his use of Prozac. The antidepressant drug accounted for about a third of Lilly's multibillion-dollar sales, and eventually the company settled the case via a payout kept secret even from the judge. Cornwell discusses questions being debated by neuroscientists and psychopharmacologists about the link between brain states and human behavior, with some affirming the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, others believing in a narrow reductionism in which the brain is seen as a "meat machine" capable of being controlled, still others asserting the nonmechanistic opinion that human beings have a measure of mental freedom. Cornwell presents a profound analysis of the fundamental question of human identity and of epistemological matters sure to be ongoing concerns as pharmacology becomes even more prevalent in treating the emotionally unstable.
