Veteran Antidepressant Suicides, The Secret Network Defending Toxic Chemicals, Plastic-Eating Fungi Diapers
June 24, 2025

In 2018, still in the throes of painful withdrawal from a psychiatric drug cocktail, U.S. Air Force veteran Derek Blumke began connecting the dots. He heard horror story after horror story that followed a disturbingly familiar pattern: starting, adjusting the dose, or abruptly stopping antidepressants was followed by personality changes, outbursts and acts of violence or suicide, leaving countless families and lives destroyed. Timothy Jensen ... an Iraq war veteran who served in the Marines, had been researching psychiatric drug overprescribing in the Veterans’ Health Administration (VA) system for years. He had his own harrowing personal story of antidepressant harm, and he had lost his best friend, a fellow veteran, to suicide soon after he was prescribed Wellbutrin for smoking cessation. Poring through the data, Blumke landed on some startling statistics: 68% of all veterans seen at least one time for care at the VA in 2019 had been prescribed psychotropic drugs, and 28% were issued prescriptions for antidepressants. “It should be zero shock that veterans have the suicide rates we do,” Blumke said. “Veteran suicide rates are two to two and a half times that of the civilian population. Prescription rates of antidepressants and psychiatric drugs are of the same multiples, which are both the highest in the world.” Antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs have huge risk profiles, but doctors and counselors aren’t even being trained about these issues.

Outro Health [is] a telehealth startup that CEO and cofounder Brandon Goode describes as “Uber for getting off antidepressants.” Outro officially launched in the US last month and is currently available in seven states. The startup is betting that many of the growing number of Americans taking antidepressants will eventually want help coming off them. Over 11 percent of US adults took medication for depression in 2023. Research has found the prevalence of adverse withdrawal symptoms may be much higher, particularly among patients who have been on them for long periods. Outro pairs patients with a clinician who meets with them on a custom schedule and guides them through a tailored tapering program. Outro currently employs a small group of medical contractors, including nurse practitioners specializing in psychiatry and general nurse practitioners, who are supervised by psychiatrists. [British academic psychiatrist and co-founder of Outro] Mark Horowitz ... was driven by his own harrowing experience coming off antidepressants ... when he was a psychiatry doctoral student. Severe insomnia and dizziness were so debilitating ...It took me years to come off, not weeks as guidelines recommended.” After he recovered, Horowitz began pushing for doctors to adopt new clinical guidelines for getting off antidepressants. He coauthored the Royal College of Psychiatry's guidance for psychiatric drug cessation and joined the UK’s National Health Service as a clinical research fellow. “To me, it is actually a very leftist issue to de-medicalize the way we treat anxiety and depression,” [Horowitz] says, noting that such illnesses are often caused “by social circumstances, by poverty, by loneliness.”

Financed partly with US taxpayers dollars, [a] firm in Missouri called v-Fluence [was] founded by former Monsanto executive Jay Byrne. [v-Fluence] established a “private social network” to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops. A profile of former New York Times food writer Mark Bittman ... includes a description of where he lives, details of two marriages and personal hobbies, and an extensive Criticisms section. Bittman said that it was a “terrible thing,” for taxpayer dollars to be used to help a PR agency “work against sincere, legitimate, and scientific efforts to do agriculture better.” Syngenta signed a contract with v-Fluence in 2002 to help the company deal with negative information coming to light about its paraquat herbicides. v-Fluence went on to help Syngenta create false or misleading online content that was “Paraquat-friendly,” used search engine optimization to suppress negative information about paraquat in Internet searches and investigated the social media pages of victims who reported injuries to Syngenta’s crisis hotline. Syngenta’s internal research found adverse effects of paraquat on brain tissue decades ago but the company withheld that information from regulators, instead working to discredit independent science linking the chemical to brain disease and developing a “SWAT team” to counter critics. In its response to those stories, Syngenta asserted that no “peer-reviewed scientific publication has established a causal connection between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease.”

More than 90% of samples of a dozen fruits and vegetables tested positive for potentially harmful pesticide residues, according to the 2025 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce. Dubbed the “Dirty Dozen,” the list is compiled from the latest government testing data on nonorganic produce by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a health advocacy organization that has produced the annual report since 2004. Spinach topped the list, with more pesticide residue by weight than any other produce tested, followed by strawberries, kale (along with mustard greens and collards), grapes, peaches, cherries, nectarines, pears, apples, blackberries, blueberries and potatoes. The annual report is [meant] to provide tools for decisions on whether to buy organic for the fruits or vegetables their families consume the most, said Alexis Temkin, EWG’s vice president of science. “One of the things that a lot of peer-reviewed studies have shown over and over again (is) that when people switch to an organic diet from a conventional diet, you can really see measurable levels in the reduction of pesticide levels in the urine.” EWG also creates an annual “Clean Fifteen” — a list of conventional produce with the least amount of pesticide residue. Pineapple was the least contaminated produce tested, followed by sweet corn (fresh and frozen), avocados, papaya, onions, frozen sweet peas, asparagus, cabbage, watermelon, cauliflower, bananas, mangos, carrots, mushrooms and kiwi.

The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending. Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles. The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to deduct direct-to-consumer advertising as a business expense for tax purposes. The new policies could threaten a key source of revenue to advertising and media companies, as well as the US pharmaceutical industry. Companies spent $10.8 billion in 2024 on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising in total. Before the loosening of advertising regulations by the Food and Drug Administration in 1997, US pharma companies had to list all possible side effects for a medication if they wanted to mention which condition the drug being advertised was intended to treat. Reading out a list of side effects took so long it drove up the cost for air time and meant there wasn’t as much broadcast advertising as there is today.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he plans to tell American medical schools they must offer nutrition courses to students or risk losing federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. Speaking at an event in North Carolina in April, Kennedy lamented, "There's almost no medical schools that have nutrition courses, and so [aspiring physicians] are taught how to treat illnesses with drugs but not how to treat them with food or to keep people healthy so they don't need the drugs." He added, "One of the things that we'll do over the next year is to announce that medical schools that don't have those programs are not going to be eligible for our funding, and that we will withhold funds from those who don't implement those kinds of courses." A study published in the Journal of Biomedical Education in 2015 surveyed 121 American medical schools in 2012-2013 and found that medical students spend, on average, only 19 hours on required nutrition education over their four years. Those numbers have frustrated some nutrition experts, who argue doctors should focus more on preventing diet-driven conditions like obesity and diabetes and less on prescribing drugs. "We have to do something about this," said Dr. David Eisenberg, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "The public imagines that physicians are required to know a lot more than they are trained to know about nutrition," added Eisenberg.

In 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant. For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers. Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records that showed vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs. Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration [banned] the factory from exporting drugs to the United States. But ... a secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that otherwise would have been banned went to unsuspecting patients. The same small cadre at the FDA granted similar exemptions to more than 20 other factories that had violated critical standards in drugmaking, nearly all in India.

Before becoming secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a swashbuckling environmental attorney who regularly took aim at the meat industry. For over a decade, a group of food safety, environmental, and animal welfare nonprofits has petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration — which Kennedy now oversees — to ban the use of ... ractopamine hydrochloride. Fed to pigs in the final weeks of their lives, ractopamine speeds up muscle gain so that pork producers can squeeze more profit from each animal. But the drug has been linked to severe adverse events in pigs, including trembling, reluctance to move, collapse, inability to stand up, hoof disorders, difficulty breathing, and even death. Earlier this year, the FDA denied the petition to ban the drug. While 26 countries have approved ractopamine use in livestock, more than 165 have banned or restricted it, and many have set restrictions on or have altogether prohibited the import of pork and beef from ractopamine-fed animals. The bans stem primarily from concerns that the trace amounts of the drug found in meat could harm consumers, especially those with cardiovascular conditions. Given the lack of trials, ractopamine’s threat to human health is unclear. But there’s a clear case to be made that ractopamine ought to be banned because of its awful effects on animals.

Late last month, some 14,000 baby chicks in Pennsylvania were shipped from a hatchery — commercial operations that breed chickens, incubate their eggs, and sell day-old chicks — to small farms across the country. But they didn’t get far. They were reportedly abandoned in a US Postal Service truck in Delaware for three-and-a-half days without water, food, or temperature control. By the time officials arrived at the postal facility, 4,000 baby birds were already dead. More than 9 billion chickens raised for meat annually in the US are kept on factory farms — long, windowless buildings that look more like industrial warehouses than farms. Up to 6 percent die before they can even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. The average consumer, if they think about farm animal suffering at all, may only think about it in the context of factory farms or slaughterhouses. But the factory farm production chain is incredibly complex, and at each step, animals have little to no protections. That leads to tens of millions of animals dying painful deaths each year in transport alone, and virtually no companies are ever held accountable. These deaths are just as tragic as the thousands who died in the recent USPS incident, and they are just as preventable. The meat industry could choose to pack fewer animals into each truck, require heating and cooling during transport, and give animals ample time for rest, water, and food on long journeys. But such modest measures would cut into their margins.

American-style intensive livestock farms are spreading across Europe, with new data revealing more than 24,000 megafarms across the continent. In the UK alone, there are now 1,824 industrial-scale pig and poultry farms. The countries with the largest number of intensive poultry farm units are France, UK, Germany, Italy and Poland in that order. For poultry farming alone, the UK ranks as having the second-highest number of intensive farms at 1,553, behind France with 2,342. Intensive livestock units are farms where 40,000 or more poultry, 2,000 or more fattening pigs, or 750 or more breeding sows are being held at any one time. The increase in so-called megafarms across Europe comes as the number of small farms has reduced dramatically, and the income gap between large and small farms has increased. The rise in intensive farming has coincided with a decline in birds, tree species and butterfly numbers. Across Europe the rise in large intensive poultry units is a key driver of river pollution. Chicken droppings contain more phosphates – which starve fish and river plants of oxygen – than any other animal manure. According to data released under freedom of information laws to Terry Jermy, the MP for South West Norfolk, megafarms in England have breached environmental regulations nearly 7,000 times since 2015. The Environment Agency carried out about 17 inspections of intensive livestock units a week in which 75% of those inspections found breaches.

Could baby poop and fungi work together to tackle landfill waste? That's the idea behind a new product launched by an Austin, Texas-based startup that sells disposable diapers paired with fungi intended to break down the plastic. Each of Hiro Technologies' MycoDigestible Diapers comes with a packet of fungi to be added to the dirty diaper before it is thrown in the trash. After a week or two, the fungi are activated by moisture from feces, urine and the environment to begin the process of biodegradation. An estimated 4 million tons of diapers were disposed of in the United States in 2018, with no significant recycling or composting. Diapers take hundreds of years to naturally break down. That means the very first disposable diaper ever used is still in a landfill somewhere. To tackle this, Hiro Technologies turned to fungi. These organisms - which include mushrooms, molds, yeasts and mildew - derive nutrients from decomposing organic matter. In 2011, Yale University researchers discovered a type of fungus in Ecuador that can feed on polyurethane, a common polymer in plastic products. They figured the fungus, Pestalotiopsis microspora, would be capable of surviving on plastic in environments lacking oxygen, like landfills. Hiro Technologies co-founder Tero Isokauppila, a Finnish entrepreneur who also founded medicinal mushroom company Four Sigmatic, said there are more than 100 species of fungi now known to break down plastics.

Hemp is one of the most sustainable materials available to manufacturers because it's cheap to grow, uses little water, doesn't need any toxic pesticides, and can absorb more carbon than trees. Hemp batteries have their own advantages, too. These batteries use lighter and more widely available materials like sulfur, boron, and hemp instead of the heavy metals used in traditional lithium-ion batteries. Some EVs use a device called a supercapacitor, which stores energy through static electricity rather than a chemical reaction, like in conventional batteries. In these batteries, a material called graphene is used. But graphene is expensive. To create ... "cannabis cars," scientists use hemp bark — a waste product created by cannabis plants — and cooked it to make a substance that resembles graphene. Hemp lasts longer than graphene. It also stores more power and is easy to source. Son Nguyen, Bemp Research's founder, told EnergyTech that the company's lithium-sulfur battery can help solve shortages in the EV battery supply chain. "Sulfur is very abundant. Boron is also relatively abundant, with the biggest boron mine being in California," Nguyen said. "Being an American company, our focus right now is to make batteries for American electric vehicles, and we do not see any supply chain problems. Bemp batteries are less reliant on rare earth metals from around the globe and thus will help U.S. national security."

An unlikely natural ally in the fight against microplastics has been discovered. Researchers in China have found that invasive water hyacinths are adept at absorbing microplastics without harm to the plant itself. Experiments against a control group showed that plastics were mostly trapped on the outside of the water hyacinth's root systems. The few that get inside the plant are quickly separated before nutrients get to the leaves. Typically, plants exposed to microplastics suffer ill effects. Water hyacinths are native to South America. Two plants were able to produce 1,200 daughter plants in four months, according to one study. Any given population of water hyacinth can double in size in six days. Once dropped into a new foreign habitat, invasive species ... can squeeze out native species, reduce biodiversity, and eliminate vital ecosystem services. Not long ago, Arkansas had to issue a statement on the threat water hyacinths posed to agriculture. On the flip side, microplastics are a scourge. They'll often end up in the fish we catch, and once eaten by humans, they can cause problems with the endocrine, immune, and reproductive systems. Despite their rapid proliferation, it may still be worth strategically deploying water hyacinths. Other studies have shown that water hyacinths can also absorb heavy metals and agricultural runoff. Meanwhile, enterprising individuals have been able to take the excess biomass of the plants and turn it into briquettes and bioplastics.

Somewhere in the vast ocean, a little boat covered in solar panels is doing something extraordinary: making its own hydrogen fuel from the seawater underneath it. The Energy Observer uses a patchwork of different cutting-edge technologies to generate enough energy to power nine homes each day. During the day, 200 square meters of solar panels charge up the boat's lithium ion batteries. Any extra energy is stored as hydrogen, thanks to a special fuel cell that goes by the name Rex H2 (short for Range Extender H2). The Rex H2 was made by Toyota, using components from Toyota's hydrogen-powered Mirai vehicle line. The fuel cell brings in seawater, removes the salt and then separates the H from the pure H20 with electricity. When the Energy Observer began its journey in 2017, it could only produce hydrogen while stopped. That changed in a big way with the addition of the Oceanwings, 12-meter sails that improved the efficiency of the Energy Observer from 18% to 42%, to the point where it can now produce hydrogen even while sailing. One of the main benefits of hydrogen is its ability to store more more electricity by weight than its lithium ion competition. This benefit is especially useful at sea. Because fossil fuels have had more than a century's head start, we now find ourselves far beyond the point of any one technology being a silver bullet for our growing energy needs. A sustainable future will require a patchwork of new technologies, like the one powering the Energy Observer.

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