Before Ronald Reagan became President Reagan in 1981, the old Soviet Union (dominated by today's Russia) imprisoned political opponents in psychiatric hospitals.  In later years, many of those former inmates recalled that the very fact of being confined among people who were truly mentally ill, was so stressful as to induce a degree of that illness in the sanest of people.  Being forcibly injected with psychotropic drugs increased that tendency.  The communist Soviet leaders hoped that imprisoning people in that manner would provide their government with a plausible cover of compassion.  It enabled them to deny that they were punishing dissidents, rather claiming that they were "helping" them.  It also insinuated that only crazy people oppose communism.  The forced hospitalization policy did in fact work to suppress some political dissent, because everyone knew that it was an insidiously cruel...(Read Full Post)