Hiroshima, Cannae and Troy

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is about an end of civilization brought on by the Greeks' violation of their gods' golden rule; but no simple "anti-MAGA" interpretation respects history, it only offends the gods anew. Homer probably believed Agamemnon's expedition was ruinous from its inception and Odysseus' trick with the horse-gift was ignoble; but no strategy to foreswear deception will redeem humanity, and treating others as you would be treated will never apply to enemies in war.

The sack of Troy was roughly a thousand years before the battle of Cannae, and roughly three thousand years before Hiroshima. But destructive war was frequent or almost continuous between and since those events, even as the hope was frequent or almost continuous, that humanity could someday, somehow, rise above such insanity. The lesson Homer offers is that people haven't changed and won't change. They think, feel, and behave exactly as they always have.

Against this enduring reality, we Westerners have recently settled upon what we call science, and a portion of it that we call medicine, as our best shot. Occasionally we are so enamored as to imagine that because of modern breakthroughs we are no longer kin to the king of Ithaca and his long-suffering bride, that we will never have to be slaughtered on a sweltering, stinking field, and that we ourselves did not and would not fly that airplane to Japan and incinerate all those people.

When we read about Achilles' rage at Patroclus' death and the golden urn containing their mixed ashes, or Penelope's proof that Odysseus was her returned husband by his simple knowledge of their great rooted bridal bed, Homer shows us we are progeny of the ancient people even as surely as we remember our own mothers and fathers. 

Our supposed upward progress from the horror of Cannae is belied by eerily comparable gore at Jonestown, Benedict Canyon, and Milwaukee. My father-in-law stood in radioactive dust on the outskirts of Nagasaki in August, 1945. He was 21 years old. Fifty years later I stood with my pre-teen children gazing across the beautiful graveyard above Omaha Beach. My youngest asked me, "Dad, who killed all these people?"

And then we encounter... psychiatry. It is a relatively recent endeavor that causes insanity, manufactures criminals and encourages war: the most destructive idea since the Inquisition, the cruelest system since chattel slavery, under a truly sick guise of "medicine".

We desperately hope the world isn't worse than ever before in history, but it's not much better. We are not saved.

I don't ask who is mentally ill, or for whom the bell tolls. 

Cannae and Hiroshima

Eighty-one years ago today on August 6, 1945, a nice man from Ohio named Paul Tibbets flew an airplane named after his mom to Japan to kill 70,000 people at 8:15 AM, with a single weapon named Little Boy.

An oddly comparable apocalypse had been perpetrated almost exactly 2,161 years earlier. On August 2, 216 BCE, 50-60 thousand Romans lay dead or dying in pools of their own blood, vomit and feces at Cannae. The Romans were killed in more intimate and terrible ways (limbs hacked off, faces, chests and abdomens punctured and mangled) over a more extended period of a few hours, rather than instantaneously vaporized like the citizens of Hiroshima.

These two horrible events, which if we would remember anniversaries should be observed together in the first week of every August, had similar impacts on the societies which lived through them.

Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Harper Perennial, 1996), is a startling book. I offered it to my father-in-law, who had been a 19-year-old American soldier trained to pilot Higgins boats to the beaches for thirteen Pacific landings, and who would have been ordered to storm mainland Japan in a deadly first wave if Truman had decided not to use the atom bomb to end World War II. Hypothetically but for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bob might never have survived the war, my wife would never have been born, and my children and grandchildren would not exist. I'll never forget Bob's perspective on the Lifton book. He very rarely spoke about the war, but he said Lifton was right, Paul Tibbets never had to drop that bomb: the USA, Truman, et al., were probably guilty of a transcendently immoral act that just incidentally saved his own life. 

At the same time, he said when societies fail to avert destructive wars, any and every terrible weapon simply will be deployed. No other morality exists. If Abraham Lincoln had been in possession of a nuke in 1863, he definitely would have used it against Richmond! Lincoln could only afford his wonderful "malice toward none and charity for all... to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who (had) borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphan..." in 1865. That was after "every drop of blood drawn by the lash (was) paid by another drawn with the sword." That's the only way it ever works.

In The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell (Random House, 2011) a renowned military historian meticulously narrates one of the most famous battles in the history of Western civilization. My daughter was a classics major who wrote a fascinating thesis about Roman society, but coincidentally developed great admiration for Hannibal Barca during her studies. The Carthaginian commander was fatally wrong about the nature of Roman power, and his inability to separate the alliances ultimately brought the slaughter of his own people and such destruction of his once-great home city as can compare with the atomic obliterations in Japan many centuries later.

The impact of Cannae on the Roman psyche was analogous to the impact of Hiroshima in America. The handful of Roman survivors of the battle were shamed and banished to Sicily. Those disgraced remnants became a nucleus for a future army, but the spectre of Cannae haunted everyone. No matter how all-powerful Rome was later, she remained instinctively afraid, she always expected the empire's fall, and she always knew that it must deserve to fall. The Republic went into full panic after its catastrophic defeat in 216. The Senate appointed a dictator, began drafting young boys, criminals and slaves to fill the ranks of the legions for the existential crisis, and even banned public mourning for those 20% of military-age Roman men whose bodies were rotting in the southern Italian field. 

Perhaps Rome only became a brutal empire as a reaction to its chronic nightmare of another Cannae. Maybe if not for that nightmare the Republic could have survived. Perhaps the USA was similarly harmed by the unspeakable flight of the Enola Gay. 

It seems to be the same whether you are victor, vanquished, or both: when so much is destroyed and you were there, you think it must somehow have been at least partly your fault. It changes you toward a darker future.

That darker future often brings desperate solutions. E.g., "psychedelic assisted therapies" or psychiatry itself, little manipulations of the brain to "improve" human cognition, emotion and behavior which only cause more harm and make people crazier than ever.

We need to pay better attention, and solve this.

Marshall Bell, Residential Services Supervisor

On April 29, 2025, a room camera recorded a patient being physically and mentally abused by a staff at Kiley Developmental Center (AKA, "Kiley Snake Pit") in Waukegan, IL, while another staff stood and watched. It was not subtle: the Illinois State Police (ISP) investigated the incident and recommended criminal prosecution of the staff. The Lake County State's Attorney exercised his discretion to not empower a grand jury or bring charges.

I have seen the room camera video. I may soon post it for the public on this blog. What it shows is a male staff hitting, insulting, and threatening a developmentally disabled patient who is attempting to retreat to his bed in his room. The staff assaulting the patient is identifiable as Marshall Bell. He is a "Residential Services Supervisor" who earned an annual salary of $65,000 in 2024, which was raised to $68,900 in 2025, when the Illinois State Police recommended his prosecution for beating up on the patient at Kiley Snake Pit. Bell never lost his job as would be expected. He was most recently paid on July 14, 2026, and his salary has evidently been raised again.

It might be interesting to try getting a straight answer from Marshall Bell's boss Takisha Hankerson, or from Takisha's boss Tonya Piephoff, or from Tonya's boss Dulce Quintero, or from Dulce's boss JB Pritzker, to this question: "Does Marshall Bell get a raise every year despite the fact that he terrorizes and beats up vulnerable patients, or because he's so good at beating up and terrorizing vulnerable patients?" Why is anyone like this still employed, and what the hell is the story at Kiley Snake Pit?

If the room camera video didn't tend to substantiate my allegations here, I would publicly retract them and sincerely apologize, on this blog, to everyone named here as well as to everyone who wants me to be more "civil" and professional as a lawyer. But the video substantiates the allegations, no matter the Lake County State's Attorney's priorities. 

When Marshall Bell terrorizes the most vulnerable people among us and continues to get paid with our tax dollars, it occurs to me that criminal law won't solve every dispute. Sometimes people have to stand up to bullies and tell unpleasant truths. That's as important a part of the legal profession as civility.

So... stay tuned.

SLOUCHING, part 15

The following is the only portion of my thesis from 28 years ago which I apparently never published on this blog. I was recently reminded of this Appendix 3 while talking about how Adelle Davis' various best-selling books were all mentioned in the substantial June 1, 1974 New York Times obituary, except one. Her book about LSD, authored under the pseudonym "Jane Dunlap," was evidently hidden. This obituary was what led me during my thesis research to Davis' son George Leisey, who well recalled being interviewed by the Times obit writer Wolfgang Saxon. Leisey told me that he certainly had spoken about the LSD book to Saxon, and he never knew why an important part of his mother's life had gone unmentioned. This may be over-obvious now.

The text below completes the serialization (on this blog) of my 1998 Northwestern University history thesis. With psychedelic drugs all the rage in psychiatry more than half a century after Adelle Davis' death, some lessons from the 1950s and 60s may be urgently worth learning. (Refer to SLOUCHING, parts 1-14 published on this blog between October 2018 and May 2019.) My sense is that many details of that earlier story will repeat themselves all too precisely, and what's currently called a "psychedelic renaissance" won't even be close to a good thing in the final view of history. 

Understanding what happened in the USA, specifically with LSD between 1945 and 1975, is a critical errand in our new age of rage and confusion. We cannot make social policy or medical science by blind reaction to developing events, such as orthodox psychiatry's abject failure to ameliorate mental/emotional/behavioral difficulties with what they have laughingly called "medicine". 

The single, fundamental concept that psychedelic drugs insistently present as the basis for social improvement is a simple two-word phrase: NO CONTROL! This also means no responsibility and no understanding. It turns the human species into a herd of animals who do not think, but only stampede randomly. "Social improvement" and "spiritual enlightenment" combine into a very dark guise for nihilism and anarchy, the actual goals of psychiatry. The hour of Yeats' rough beast has perhaps come round at last.

The music's over, baby!

________________________________________________

Adelle Davis, Best-Selling Author, Nutritionist, Dies

PALOS VERDES ESTATES, Calif., May 31 (UPI)—Adelle Davis, one of the nation's best known authorities on nutrition, who contended that almost any disease could be prevented by proper diet, died at her home today of bone cancer. She was 70 years old.

Miss Davis had written four widely read books and made countless lecture and television appearances with the message, “You are what you eat.”

She had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments and recently returned from a hospital to her home in this Los Angeles suburb.

She is survived by her husband, Frank Sieglinger, a, lawyer; a son, George Leisey, and a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Frodahl.

A funeral service is to be held Monday.

An Outspoken Believer

By WOLFGANG SAXON

The guru of lay nutritionists, Adelle Davis was a strong and outspoken believer in a healthful diet as the key to well‐being, and she propounded her message in books that sold in the millions and as a television talk‐show guest who would mince no words.

When informed last year that she was suffering from cancer of the bone marrow, Miss Davis later recalled, her reaction was one of shock and disbelief. “I thought this was for people who drink soft drinks, who eat white bread, who eat refined sugar and so on,” she told an interviewer.

Miss Davis said her first thought was, “I have been a failure.” But in reviewing her life, she concluded that while she had eaten well on the Indiana farm on which she grew up, she changed her diet for the worse when she went away to college and ate what she called “junk food” until the nineteenfifties.

Until recently the picture of health, with glowing skin, Miss Davis castigated Americans for paying a lot of money for food that, she said, couldn't be unhealthier if it had been designed that way. “A woman wants to murder her husband can do it thoroughly in the kitchen,” she once said in the blunt way of speaking that was one of her trademarks. “There won't even be an inquest.”

She bristled at the very thought of “enriched” white bread and packaged mixes, and advocated whole‐grain bread, milk, fresh fruit and vegetables, an egg or two and some cheese every day and liver and fish several times a week.

On the question of cholesterol, she told an interviewer once, “We need choesterol in the body.”

Advocate of Vitamins

Miss Davis was among the country's most vocal proponents of vitamins to supplement a good diet, and she swallowed dozens of vitamin pills daily. She also carried her own brewer's yeast wherever her lectures or television appearances would take her, and at home in California she played tennis five times a week until recently.

Miss Davis's books—“Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit,” “Let's Cook It Right,” Let's Get Well” and “Let's Have Healthy Children”—were entitled as positively as she sounded in person.

They also sold more than two and a half million copies in hard covers and about seven, million in paperback.

University based nutritionists often tended to agree with what she said about bad dietary habits and the poor nutrition of Americans, regardless of income. But they objected that she derived her conclusions mainly from anecdotal evidence or from an unscientific approach to the subject.

Thus, they would seize upon her suggestion that Germany conquered France in World War II because German black bread and beer were nutritionally superior to French white bread and wine, her warning that Russians eat much less of what she said were illness‐breeding refined foods than do Americans, or her statement that there was no crime where there was good diet, while, she noted, the murderous Manson clan of Southern California had subsisted mainly on candy bars.

Yet Miss Davis did have an academic and practical background in her field. After leaving her native farm in Union Township, Indiana, where she was born the last of five girls, she attended Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California at Berkeley, where shse majored in dietetics. Fellow students at Purdue called her “Vitamin Davis” in 1924 because she talked about vitamins incessantly as she pursued the search for information on nutrition.

Dietitian at Bellevue

She went to work as a dietitian at Bellevue Hospital in New York, supervised nutrition in the Yonkers public schools and, in 1931, became a consulting nutritionist for three New York obstetricians. During that period, she also wrote two small books and a textbook.

Later in the thirties, she moved to California, married—and was subsequently divorced —and earned a master's degree in biochemistry at the University of Southern California. Again she worked as a consultant nutritionist, for California clinics, and planned thousands of individual diets for people suffering from a great variety of illnesses or malfunctions.

Miss Davis was one crusader and mother who was hardly surprised when consumerism and the demand for organic food came to the fore in recent years, with millions of Americans who began to take the warnings of nutritionists more seriously.

Yet she witnessed the sudden proliferation of “health food” stores with a wary eye. “It's tragic the junk a lot of them sell, the misstatements they make,” she said recently. She also observed that cancer, in her opinion, was related to the inadequacies of the American diet, and voiced the hope that her illness would not dishearten people who had held her nutritional advice in high regard.

Miss Davis, who with her second husband grew vegetables and fruit in their garden, recommended a minimum daily vitamin supplement that might include vitamin C, at least 100 units of vitamin E and one or two fish‐liver oil tablets, the source of both vitamins A and D.

“And if you want to feel twice as good, brewer's yeast,” she would remark.

Psychiatry, psychedelic drugs and democracy

"God forbid that in a democratic society, we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don't understand the job, then we are not a free people." 

--Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, concerning federal drug research and regulation of LSD (May 24, 1966).

These comments by Robert F. Kennedy (note... not "Jr.") were recorded almost exactly sixty years ago. He was talking about how the U.S. government should think about psychedelic drugs, which at that time pretty much just meant LSD. 

Other psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, ayahuasca, mescaline, bufo and ketamine, have very different historical contexts: they may come with long indigenous traditions and sacred rituals, or medical applications which predate populist recreational use/abuse in Western societies. LSD was unique or paradigmatic, as having been accidentally invented in a pharma company lab and later, within a single human generation, widely disseminated to be used secretly and illegally as both a sacrament and a weapon, creating huge socio-cultural impact.

LSD started out as a psychiatric drug. It presents a simpler, historical picture of psychedelics for mental health medicine because intentions connected to it, however various from one individual user to another, have not significantly changed, but were all there in 1943 for Albert Hoffman's bicycle ride. It can be seen as one short, peculiarly Western narrative.

These days we get very complicated indeed (and political once again), with our discussions and debates about human salvation, chemical Christianity, mental health, science and brains. One recent (May 2026) editorial by several international experts almost reads like a Cold War intelligence estimate, suggesting elaborate countermeasures against an impending demise of scientific medicine.

Despite eerily reminiscent hoopla from groups like MAPS and boosters like RFK, Jr., there is increasingly significant evidence that psychedelics will only become the next discreditable dead-end for psychiatry. The "science" is all about rebranding LSD as "DT120ODT", toad venom as "GH001", or Ecstacy (MDMA) as "DT402". But the problem of researching benefits vs. risks remains intractable. Functional unblinding is finally just ignored as though it's irrelevant, completely contrary to fundamental psychological principles and experience.

However with the internet and social media, we live in a very different world from the one when an earlier generation of Kennedys dropped acid secretly, behind closed doors, while their military and security experts researched it to help save the free Christian world. The "Russian roulette" character of psychedelic drug taking has changed, and the odds are dire.

Instead of one bullet in the cylinder, there now are three or four.

NY Times on "fears among psychiatrists"

Supposedly, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is mounting a push to rein in the use of depression medications. Ellen Barry reports from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Francisco that thousands of psychiatrists gathering there are feeling a current of anxiety due to Kennedy's policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe SSRI's. The worry is that Kennedy's statements will convince people to refuse psychiatric medications.

Dr. Marketa Wills, the CEO of APA promised that her organization will be standing tall against "anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need."

That's easy until you question what she means by "care" and who defines what patients "need".  The only kinds of treatment psychiatrists have specialized in for a couple generations are drugs and shock. Presumably, drugs and shock are "care" whether people want them or not, and "need" is determined by any arbitrary DSM "diagnosis" that usually gets assigned after the fact of a chosen prescription anyway. 

So, if you couple that perspective with the fact that psychiatry is uniquely dependent upon coercion to maintain its status as a branch of medicine or any market for its services, RFK, Jr. might appear to APA types much as Frederick Douglass appeared to Southern slaveholders in the Nineteenth Century: he is threatening to abolish their way of life.

One interesting question will be whether APA can ever benefit from RFK's favor of psychedelic drugs. Psychiatrists apparently worry that Kennedy will work to generally discredit psychiatric "treatment"  (the currently approved drugs, ECT). Psychedelics were originally psychiatric drugs, and they may be again if a desperate last resort is required to maintain the guise of a medical specialty. Psychiatry was a post-World War II political tactic before it became "medical treatment" in the United States. Many members of RFK, Jr.'s extended family were closely connected to the history of LSD. 

Right now we all probably have to wonder which is tail, which is dog, and who's wagging whom....

Indira Vazzalwar, M.D. (overseer)

Indira Vazzalwar, M.D., is a psychiatrist currently in charge at the Kiley snake pit. She makes a salary of more than $300,000 a year which the taxpayers are on the hook for, presumably along with benefits, pension, etc. I have been advocating on behalf of a mother whose disabled adult child is one of Dr. Vazzalwar's slaves there in Waukegan, although Dr. Vazzalwar only just came to my attention today as an overseer. I'm not sure how long she's been "Medical" (the quotation marks are sarcastic, of course) Director of Kiley snake pit, perhaps several years. From a quick internet search, she doesn't seem very proud of that position, and she doesn't apparently promote it as any sort of professional credit. It's hard to blame her for that.

Kiley is one of several state-operated facilities housing developmentally disabled ("DD") adults in Illinois. I don't know whether it's the worst of them all, or (God forbid!) the best, because I have spent almost all of my 20+ years in this business of abolition at forensic mental health (rather than DD) facilities. But Kiley is bad, that's for sure. It's bad because the staff there (not all, just some) are bad or badly intended, not because they don't get enough of our money. They cannot improve the conditions or the lives of the people they call their "patients" with any "treatments" they pretend should be medically or scientifically helpful. They are not worth what the public pays them. They lie, incessantly, necessarily and unnecessarily (without knowing the difference), to the public and to themselves.

The situation of my client's adult child at Kiley is one good example among many, on a list offering an unlimited supply. Only a few years ago she was mildly impaired, verbal, social, clean and physically healthy. Now she strongly prefers to sequester herself in her bedroom at Kiley for up to 22 hours a day. She suffers from occasional seizures, is essentially non-verbal, and most of the clinical staff are afraid of her. They cannot convince or help her to maintain acceptable hygiene. She throws things, refuses medications, and worst of all, she accuses people of physically abusing her, pushing her down, hitting her. Her mother believes the abuse allegations against staff, and causes trouble.

One reason this "patient" is believed by her mother, is that once a week or more, she is actually injured in some way that plausibly evidences physical abuse. On April 19th, 23rd, 27th, and May 1st, 2026, there were fresh bruises or lacerations. Three of those four occasions prompted emergency room visits for stitches or other treatment. Hospital clinicians not affiliated with Kiley are generally horrified.

The Illinois Department of Human Services' (IDHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is supposed to protect against abuse and neglect of vulnerable people in state institutions.  They don't do it; they are useless at best, or worse, complicit in coverups. And this despite elaborate rules and training for reporting and investigating any and all suspicions of abuse. The regime is known as OIG Rule 50. My client the mother was not told about Rule 50 or how it is supposed to protect her child, until recently (probably by me). When she learned that all staff at Kiley snake pit are required to report any suspicion of abuse to OIG within four hours, she started asking questions. Some of her questions were directed toward Dr. Vazzalwar, e.g.:

      Dr. Indira, did you report the injuries to my daughter which we saw on 4/19, 4/23, 4/27 and 5/1 to OIG... or did the nurses who were present call OIG?

The Kiley "Medical" Director was evasive about that, but eventually she answered:

       It was reported to ISI and ISI reported to OIG.

This curt, passive-voice answer was not satisfactory. As a matter of fact, in my opinion it was evidence of deflection and cover-up. "It was reported...." Oh really..? By whom? When exactly? 

The acronym ISI is for Kiley snake pit's own internal security staff, who are probably useful most of all to obscure the strict responsibility of each and every individual staff member, including Dr. Vazzalwar herself, to personally call OIG, about any allegation, even if it is only based on mere suspicion of abuse. Having staff report allegations to ISI and designating ISI to report to OIG is what Rule 50 calls "screening", and it's illegal.

My client's child continues to be tortured, made worse rather than better; and my client herself is incessantly insulted, threatened and gaslighted by people who are supposed to be helping professionals and reasonably honest public servants. 

Indira Vazzalwar seems more like a criminal to me.