In the world of psychiatry nearly all drugs in use today were created between 1950 and 1969. It’s hard to imagine with so many drug commercials on TV revealing new and groundbreaking products, that the same products being advertised today were actually created based on chemistry performed more than 60 years ago (Klein, p.259, 2014). The reason behind this is simple. The creation of new drugs based on finding new molecular entities is extremely costly. For the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to approve a new drug to market costs can exceed 5 billion dollars and can take as long as 15 years to satisfy the criteria for safe and effective (Marston, 2013). Pharmaceutical companies, however, have found a simple way to beat the regulations and mandates of the FDA. It is called molecular modification, or “me-too” drugs (Klein, p.259, 2014). Drug companies take an existing drug that has met FDA testing and licensing and simply alter its molecular make up slightly. This allows the drug to be re-branded, re-named and re-sold as a brand new revolutionary drug. In fact, the drug is actually chemically the same as the previous drug it replaced. Why would psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies stand for such blatant misinformation and trickery? Well, in 2013 the combine total of prescriptions issued for the top 25 psychiatric drugs reached 419 million prescriptions (Grohol, 2015). These included anti-depressants, ADHD medications, anti-psychotics, anti-anxiety, sleep medications
