Paul Janssen (1926–2003)
Several years after the 1954 introduction of chlorpromazine (Thorazine), a drug that revolutionized the treatment of schizophrenia, Paul Janssen synthesized haloperidol. This was among the most important drugs to be developed at Janssen Pharmaceutica, which he founded in 1953 in Beerse, Belgium, with the vision of a totally independent and self-supporting research laboratory. Discoverer of more than eighty medicines, four of which are on the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines, Janssen was the runner up to “Apostle of the Lepers” Father Damien as The Greatest Belgian in a 2005 poll organized by Flemish media.
Haloperidol (Haldol) was originally intended to be a chemical modification of meperidine (pethidine, Demerol), a narcotic painkiller. Although devoid of analgesic effects, Haldol proved to be an extremely active anti-schizophrenic drug, with 1 mg of haloperidol equivalent to 50 mg of chlorpromazine. Haloperidol and chlorpromazine drugs are essentially equivalent in their clinical effectiveness but have different side effects. Haloperidol is primarily used for manic and highly agitated patients.
Haloperidol was approved for use in the United States in 1967, almost a decade after it was available in Europe. In addition to an oral dosage form, it is also available for long-acting use as an injection given every four weeks to patients who frequently relapse or who fail to take their medication.
CHEMICAL CONTROL OF DISSENT. Haloperidol was an ancillary tool of repression during the last decades of the former Soviet Union. In lieu of being deported to labor camps, mentally healthy political dissidents were interned in psychiatric hospitals, in isolation, for extended periods of detention. Many were said to have received high doses of haloperidol to treat their “sluggish schizophrenia,” a classical symptom of which was the desire to reform the political system. Apparently selected because it was one of the few anti-schizophrenic drugs available in sufficient quantities in the Soviet Union at the time, haloperidol was used to crush dissidents’ will to resist by converting them into zombies.
SEE ALSO Chlorpromazine (1952), Reserpine (1952), Clozapine (1989), Zyprexa (1996).
Schizophrenia ranks among the top ten causes of disability in developed countries worldwide, with rates ranging from 0.5 to 1 percent of the population. At least 200,000 of the 600,000 homeless people in the United States suffer from either schizophrenia or bipolar (manic-depressive) illness.