Growing numbers of children and adults take a psychotropic everyday to help them manage problems-in-living. Strangely and problematically, many of our most powerful institutions in the United States have become completely hooked, reliant, dependent, on psychotropic drugs—prisons, nursing homes, foster care, the military—for the crisis management of populations. While we rightly focus on the drug problems ravaging the U.S. human population—problems with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, methamphetamines—we need to broaden our vision to critique the drug abuse problems of American institutions. Dr. Anthony Hatch is associate professor of Science in Society, Sociology, and African American Studies at Wesleyan University. His research and teaching focus on science, medicine, technology, and social inequalities. He is the author of Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) which critiques how biomedical scientists, government researchers, and drug companies use concepts of race and ethnicity to study and treat something called “metabolic syndrome.” He is a proud member of the Black Phoenix Rising Collective and the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network and held a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Currently, Dr. Hatch is finishing a new book tentatively titled Silent Cells that examines how social institutions use psychotropic drugs to manage the thought and behavior of institutionalized populations. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx