The Multinational Monitor

September 2003 - VOLUME 24 - NUMBER 9

T H E    L A W R E N C E    S U M M E R S    M E M O R I A L   A W A R D

THE LAWRENCE SUMMERS MEMORIAL AWARD*

The September 2003 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Forest Pharmaceuticals, makers of the drug citalopram, brand name Celexa.

A Forest Pharmaceuticals-sponsored study found that citalopram, an antidepressant in the class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, reduces compulsive shopping tendencies in "binge shoppers."

Two thirds of the studied "binge shoppers" taking the drug reported much improvement in their condition over a seven-week period.

"Patients said to me, ëI go to the shopping mall with my friends and I don't buy anything,'" Dr. Lorrin Koran, of Stanford University Medical Center and the lead researcher on the study, told BBC News Online.

Dr. Robert Lefever, director of the Promis recovery center in Kent, England, told the BBC News Online that using pills to cure "shopping disorder" simply replaced one addiction with another.

"Of course antidepressants help the disorder, in the same way they would help alcohol dependency," he said.

The Promis center refers people to debtors' counseling if they have shopping disorders, BBC News Online reports.

Source: BBC News Online, "Drugs ëStop Compulsive Shopping,'" July 18, 2003. Thanks to Greg Nigh's ZNet Commentary for calling this story to our attention.

*In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" wrote Summers, who went on to serve as Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.