Last year's market was such a success that we decided to do it again this year. Board members Frederike Lubiewski and Mira de Vries manned the booth. We had invited a group that protests the use of isolation cells in psychiatry, a very common phenomenon in the Netherlands, but no one from the group showed up. The crowds were even larger than last year, no thanks to the weather, more likely because this year was a national holiday.
    A new addition to our booth this year was our petition to stop medical research on children. We started it in response to a proposal by the European Commission to require all drugs for European children to be tested on children. It's not difficult to guess whose lobbyists were behind this proposal. The responses from the public to our petition were varied. Many people asked in surprise, "What? Does that really happen?" Some people praised us for our efforts. One woman even sighed, "Finally somebody is doing something about it." There were, of course, also people who think drugs for European children should be tested on other children. Often these were parents who were only persuaded to sign our petition after we pointed out to them that they might themselves be put under pressure to enroll their child in a testing program. Our booth happened to be directly across from the Vegan Society's booth, so visitors to the market could sign a petition against medical experiments on animals on one side and against medical experiments on children on the other side. We collected several pages of signatures.
    Like last year, the many young physicians and medical students who passed our booth were in general hostile to our ideas, and in particular opposed our petition. "If we don't test drugs on children, how will we develop new drugs for them?" The idea that there might be too many drugs for children already was of course unfathomable to the docs. One group of medical students told Frederike that they work in a neonatal intensive care unit doing research all day, and that they see nothing wrong with that. Another physician said that she would allow her own children to be used for medical research. What can you say to someone like that? Two young physicians (apparently older physicians don't visit markets) told Mira that most people aren't intelligent enough to make decisions about their own health care.
    Our most popular flyers, besides the memorial speech transcript, were the ones dealing with psychiatric drugs. Many people took along a sheet of tips on how to stop taking them. Some of the people who came by told us that they were being forced-drugged as outpatients. This was particularly painful as our supreme court had ruled that same week that court-ordered patients may not be drugged against their wishes off the hospital grounds. We saw some people with obvious tardive dyskinesia (movement disorders caused by neuroleptic drugs) come by. Frederike and Mira could do no more than exchange unhappy glances. One man who said he works as a nurse in an institution for mentally disabled adults was furious about our flyer which rejects involuntary commitment. How could he do his work if he had to ask permission? Mira suggested that a mentally disabled person would always have a guardian who could consent to confinement, but this did not placate him. He even threatened to "have something done about" us. We thought that was a great idea, as it would certainly draw attention to our viewpoints. We made sure he had our address.
    Our new flyer offering tips on how to take fewer drugs in general also generated not a little interest. Some people said it never occurred to them before that they should question their doctor's prescriptions. Others told us their own stories of woe.
    One man quite rightly criticized us for not having a flyer about privacy. We're going to work on that right away. Meanwhile, we were able to inform him that if he lives in the greater Amsterdam area, anybody who works in any pharmacy in the same area and also knows his name and birth date, can look up in the computer exactly which drugs he's been prescribed. The man's mouth literally dropped open with surprise. We advised him to go to his pharmacy and and fill in a form for blocking outside pharmacies from accessing his information. This procedure exists, probably because doctors won't stand for invasions of their and their families' privacy. The general public hasn't been informed about the pharmacy network, let alone about the possibility for exempting oneself.
    We hope the public was able to learn valuable information from us. We are very certain we learned a great deal from them and from the experience. We plan to be there again next year.