Pledge Drive

Hi. Many readers have suggested over the least several months that I put a PayPal button on this site and ask readers for money. I've held off for a longtime (I'm sheepish about asking people for money), but recently decided to listen to them. So please contribute what you can.

Why would you contribute to me? I'm sure you'll have your own reasons for doing so, or for not doing so. When a few curious sorts have asked me what I am proudest about with my work here (ie, "How do you justify your existence?"), I tell them it's over three things.

One, because I have worked my butt off on this blog for about two years--to the tune of about 250,000 words of text--and, two, because I made the Zyprexa documents publicly available when no one else in the US would--or could. I did so at great risk to myself financially and legally. Things worked out OK, but it was gnarly there for a while.

Since then, several hundred sets of the documents--the ones Eli Lilly fought to keep from public view--have been downloaded by readers. The complete set of documents is also now archived at two major universities--one, a medical school on the West Coast, the other an Ivy League institution Back East. I expect to see a few academic articles relating to these documents in the near future.

And, three, I began asking some hard questions about the state of the psychopharmacological revolution and its corporate masters when there was a dearth of such inquiries on both the Net and in the media. That's different now, thankfully.

I haven't a particular pledge drive total in mind. Let's just see what happens.

So what would I do with reader donations? Aside from the nice idea of being compensated a bit for my time, I am using a 7-year-old G3 iMac, so being able to pay for an upgrade (even a used one) would be nice. As would buying myself a new office chair as I currently use an 8-year-old desk chair that is falling apart. In addition, my bandwidth, disk space and Movable Type license run to about $240 a year. I'd also like to be able to pay a designer for redesign work. It'd be nice to get some help covering some of that.

There's a PayPal button over on the right. If you prefer snail mail, let me know and I'll shoot you my mailing address.

My office assistants Katie and KC thank you. As do I.