Lupron Guinea Pigs: Two Decades of Experimentation on Autistic Children (Part Two)
We take an in-depth look at Lupron, touted in the noughties as a quack 'cure' for autism, embraced later by doctors as 'gender affirming care'... but still somehow used primarily on autistic children.
In part one, we looked at the history of Lupron, Mark and David Geier’s ‘Lupron Protocol’ (a quack autism cure supported briefly by Lupron’s own manufacturers, TAP Pharmaceuticals) and the creation, medicalisation and politicisation of the trans-identified child.
Lupron bears the hallmarks of a ‘solution looking for a problem’. Since its origins as a palliative prostate cancer therapy, it has branched out, being prescribed variously – approved and non-approved by the US Food and Drug Administration – to treat autism, breast cancer, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, infertility, short stature and precocious puberty (approved in 2020). In 2007, Dr. Norman Spack, who treated Susie Green’s son, Jackie, began prescribing Lupron as a treatment for ‘gender dysphoria’, an ailment rarely seen in American children before this time.
The image above shows trends in mentions of ‘transgender children’ in books published between 1990 and 2008. Mentions were non-existent in published books until the mid-90s (when the Dutch Protocol was developed) but shot up by 500% between 2007 and 2008 – the year Dr. Spack opened his clinic. (At the time, there had been no long-term studies on the effects of delaying children’s puberty past the normal age.)
In 2017, Kaiser Health News published an article about the possible negative long-term effects of Lupron-use; the author, Christina Jewett, interviewed young women who had been given Lupron as girls to delay puberty or make them grow taller. They told her that they had experienced the short-term side-effects listed on the paediatric label, which included pain at the injection site, mood swings and headaches. But years after taking Lupron, these young women began to experience health conditions that usually affect far older women. Though still only in their early- to mid-twenties, they had been diagnosed with conditions such as osteopenia (thinning of the bones) and osteoporosis; one had a cracked spine while another needed a total hip replacement; others experienced chronic pain and degenerative disc disease. More than 20,000 adverse event reports were filed with the FDA in the decade between 2007 and 2017.
The most famous historical example of a pharmaceutical company inventing an ailment for its pre-existing product to magically cure, is Listerine. Formulated in the 1880s, the general-purpose antiseptic was used for cleaning feet, scrubbing floors, treating gonorrhoea and other hygiene issues. It was not until the 1920s that Gerard Wheat Lambert, son of the owner of the Lambert Pharmaceuticals, came up with a new word which would make the product fly off the shelves: halitosis. Adapted from the Latin word for breath, halitus, Wheat Lambert Jr. added the scientific-sounding suffix -osis (‘disease’) to make people believe they were the “victims” of a medical condition, which required Listerine to cure it. Subsequent marketing campaigns targeted women, stressing the terrible consequences of halitosis, which could not be discerned by the sufferer – unmarriageability and isolation – and strongly suggested they should use the product whether or not they believed they have the condition because even "[their] closest friends won't tell [them]".
Lambert Pharmaceuticals developed its Listerine-marketing techniques in St. Louis, Missouri – a relative stone’s-throw away from its peers at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago – which would become a template for future Lupron-marketers at Abbott Labs/TAP Pharmaceuticals to follow: instead of expensively manufacturing a new drug, simply repurpose an existing one and instead of trying to cure an existing illness (which could be difficult), simply invent a new illness and propose your cure – after all, if you never really had the illness, how can you say the drug did not cure it? The beauty of the Listerine scam is its simplicity. The problem with TAP’s investment in Mark and David Geiers’ Lupron Protocol is that autism was an already existing condition with recognisable traits/symptoms. Treating autism with puberty blockers would be profitable because it made patients for life but the fact that it demonstrably did not work meant the drug’s ineffectiveness would likely be exposed, leading to opt-outs at best and lawsuits at worst. Even Dr. Mayer Eisenstein - who joked that before his medical career took off, his ambition was to be "a corrupt, dirty Illinois politician" - was having second thoughts in 2009, when it was proving difficult to get health insurance companies to pay for the drugs. In the US at the time, a climate of paranoia around heavy metals and supposed government cover-ups, anti-vaccine sentiment, charismatic ‘wellness’ and behavioural therapy gurus undermining medical practitioners and the undeniably dishonest behaviour of pharmaceutical companies was creating a readily exploitable market of parents desperate to find a cure for their children’s incurable autism. Would the fact that Lupron did not cure autism be an insurmountable obstacle to Abbott Labs capturing this market? More on this later.
In December 2018, in the UK, Andrew Gilligan wrote an article for The Times about the charity Mermaids, which was being granted half a million pounds of Big Lottery Fund money. He reported opposition to the grant from feminists, who cited, among other concerns, the children’s charity’s promotion of the GP, Dr. Helen Webberley, who privately prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children as young as 12 (one of whom died by suicide aged eighteen, just months after the article was published). Astonishingly, Mermaids continued to recommend Dr. Webberley even after she was convicted later that month of operating her gender clinic illegally. Despite the conviction and subsequent two-month-long tribunal in 2021, Dr. Webberley and her husband, Mike, have continuously operated and promoted Gender GP, their private gender clinic.
A year later, in December 2019, nearly a decade after the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) began to experiment with puberty blockers on trans-identified children, a young woman called Keira Bell, who had been treated at GIDS as a child and since ‘detransitioned’, and the mother of a female, autistic trans-identified GIDS patient, ‘Mrs. A’, supported by former Senior Clinical Lecturer at the clinic, Susan Evans, brought a judicial review against the Tavistock, in the belief that children are insufficiently developed to understand the long-term effects and repercussions of ‘gender-affirming’ hormone treatments and surgeries and therefore unable to give their informed consent.
In part three, we explore the failures of the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in more detail, see how experiments on autistic children with puberty blockers continued and the attempts made by ‘gender experts’ to legitimise their unethical practices by conflating and obfuscating the symptoms of autism and gender dysphoria.