(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Americans watch more television than anyone else in the world, and as we watch television we are constantly being bombarded by commercials from pharmaceutical companies. As I discussed in a previous article, pharmaceutical companies spend more than 15 billion dollars on television advertising each year. The reason they do this is because it works. We are the most drugged nation in the history of the world, and the pharmaceutical companies are absolutely swimming in cash.
According to polling that was conducted by KFF, a whopping 61 percent of all U.S. adults admit that they are currently taking at least one pharmaceutical drug.
That is a solid majority of the population. And once they have you on one drug, they are much more likely to be able to get you on another.
- The KFF survey found that 13 percent of U.S. adults are taking one pharmaceutical drug.
- The KFF survey found that 11 percent of U.S. adults are taking two pharmaceutical drugs.
- The KFF survey found that 10 percent of U.S. adults are taking three pharmaceutical drugs.
And most shocking of all, the KFF survey found that 27 percent of U.S. adults are taking at least four pharmaceutical drugs.
That means that more than a quarter of the adult population is currently on at least four prescription medications.
That is insane! But this is where we are at as a society.
Elderly Americans are the biggest victims. One study found “that an estimated 89 percent of older adults” took at least one prescription medication within the past 12 months.
Even if you aren’t sick, the system is designed to find a reason why you should become a customer of the big pharmaceutical companies.
For example, the percentage of Americans that have been diagnosed with depression has more than tripled since 2005…
Today, new CDC data showed that nearly 18 percent of Americans had depression in 2023, an all-time high. In 2005, when Cruise’s controversial interview aired, that figure was about 5.4 percent.
At this stage, it is so easy to be diagnosed with depression.
Just act a little bit sad, and they will gladly start giving you pills.
This is particularly true for women. According to Google AI, women in the United States are using antidepressants at a rate that is more than twice as high as men…
According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) conducted in 2015-2018, approximately 17.7% of women aged 18 and older reported using antidepressants in the past 30 days. This is significantly higher than the rate for men, which was 8.4%.
If you have been on antidepressants, you already know how they can mess with your head.
I have seen it happen to people that I know personally.
So what is going to happen to the millions of Americans that are highly dependent on these drugs if they suddenly can’t get them anymore?
Today, we import approximately 75 percent of our essential medicines, and most of those essential medicines come from either China or India…
According to Exiger, the U.S. currently imports 75% of its essential medicines, with most of them coming from China and India. While India produces about half of the generic drugs the U.S. imports, it relies heavily on China for 80% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). More than 500 generic drugs rely on one country’s APIs, including treatments for diabetes and heart conditions as well as antibiotics.
Another factor putting Americans at risk is the use of forced labor in the production of pharmaceuticals. Exiger found that multiple suppliers, including Sinopharm, Zhejiang Shindai Chemical Group and Zhejiang Chemicals Export Corp., relied on Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang. Customs and Border Patrol is supposed to block goods made with forced labor; however, some still get through.
We have got a real mess on our hands.
Many pharmaceutical drugs will soon become much more expensive, and in other cases we could witness extreme shortages.
Millions of U.S. adults are about to experience a very rude awakening.
Of course it isn’t just adults that are being drugged into oblivion.
Today, millions of American boys are being given drugs for ADHD…
More than 21% of 14-year-old boys in this country now supposedly suffer from this condition. The number goes up to 23% for 17-year-old boys. As a result, prescriptions for drugs like Ritalin and Adderall have skyrocketed. From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat ADHD increased dramatically by nearly 60%. Boys between the ages of 10 to 14 were the demographic that saw the highest increase in these prescriptions.
What we are witnessing is a national tragedy.
Most of the boys that are taking these drugs simply do not need them.
As Glenn Back has accurately pointed out, our “feminized education system” tends to punish normal male behavior…
“The truth is we’ve been told not that a feminized education system has increasingly punished normal male behavior it doesn’t understand; it’s not that schools have lost their capacity to educate male students; it’s not that smartphone use and electronics in general have become distractions teachers have been unable to control. Instead, we’re led to believe that boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe psychological disorder,” Glenn reads from the Daily Wire piece.
He agrees that what’s being done to boys in education is a travesty.
“Everything is just push the girls, push the girls, push the girls — ‘you can be anything.’ ‘Shut up, sit down, have some Ritalin’ to the boys,” he condemns.
The boys who are being written off as distractible and out of control are really just being typical boys.
He is right.
We have been trained to think that typical male behavior is abnormal when it most certainly is not.
Sadly, an increasing percentage of U.S. adults now believe that children are such a “burden” that they don’t want to be parents at all…
A new study shows the number of U.S. adults who do not want to have children has doubled in 20 years.
“We found that the percentage of non-parents who don’t want any children rose from 14% in 2002 to 29% in 2023,” Jennifer Watling Neal, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Michigan State University (MSU), said.
“During the same period, the percentage of non-parents who plan to have children in the future fell from 79% to 59%,” she added.
The relentless propaganda that they have been feeding us is working.
More U.S. adults than ever before are completely rejecting parenthood.
Needless to say, this is a recipe for societal suicide.
If we do not reproduce ourselves, we can’t expect to have any sort of a positive future.
Sadly, millions of Americans simply do not care about the future at this point because they have already been drugged into oblivion.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
