Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America

The modern penchant for transforming human problems into "diseases" and judicial sanctions into "treatments," replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls "pharmacracy." He warns that the creeping substitution of democracy for pharmacracyprivate personal concerns increasingly perceived as requiring a medical-political responseinexorably erodes personal freedom and dignity.

Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His books include The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement; The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience; and Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide, all published by Syracuse University Press.