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After Hubbard’s death, Miscavige continued the campaign. In 1995, he told the
International Association of Scientologists that the church’s goals for the new
millennium were to “place Scientology at the absolute center of society” and to
“eliminate psychiatry in all its forms.” The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a
lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum,
maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist. In this view,
psychiatrists have been responsible for the Holocaust, apartheid, and even 9/11. The
commission is not above bending the truth to make its point. The president of CCHR,
Dave Figueroa, asserts that Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a
psychiatrist who took control of bin Laden’s “thought patterns.” “Whatever type of
drugs that Zawahiri used to make that change in bin Laden, we don’t know,” Figueroa
explained. “We know there was a real change in that guy’s attitude.” This view is
reiterated in the terrorism portion of the museum. (In fact, Zawahiri is a general
surgeon, not a psychiatrist.) 10
CCHR’s main eort has been an international campaign against the use of psychiatric
drugs, especially for children. The surgeon general of the United States issued a report
in 2001 claiming that more than twenty percent of children ages nine to seventeen had
a diagnosable mental or addictive disorder, and that four million American children
suered from major mental illness. There is obviously an immense market for
medications to treat such disorders. About ten percent of Americans over the age of six
are on antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs are the top-selling category of drugs in
the country. They have become a plague on the schoolgrounds of America, with
indiscriminate prescriptions creating a new culture of drug dependency—one that the
pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession bear some responsibility for.
Haggis has been a substantial supporter of the CCHR. As a boy, he says, he spent most
of his days staring out the window, daydreaming—a candidate for an attention decit
disorder diagnosis. “I identied with the oddballs and the mists,” he said. “Those who
conform have very little chance of making a dierence in life.” He was sure that if his
parents had medicated him, he might never have become a writer. He hosted fundraisers
for CCHR in his home. “I simply believe that psychiatric drugs are overprescribed,
especially to children,” he said. “I think that is a crime.”
Scientologists have been seeking ways of criminalizing psychiatric remedies. In the
same period that Cruise was chastising Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, Kirstie
Alley and Kelly Preston were testifying before state lawmakers in Florida, who passed a
bill, written in part by Scientologists, that would hold schoolteachers criminally liable
for suggesting to parents that their children might be suering from a mental health
condition, such as attention decit disorder. Governor Jeb Bush vetoed the bill.
Governor Jon Huntsman did the same in Utah. Similar bills have been pushed by the
CCHR in other states. In her Florida testimony, Kirstie Alley held up photographs of
children who had committed suicide after taking psychotropic drugs. “None of these
children were psychotic before they took these drugs,” she asserted, sobbing so hard she
could barely speak. “None of these children were suicidal before they took these drugs.”
Some drug makers have covered up studies that indicate an increased danger of