intervention they impose on the victim a "treatment," and legislators and judges legitimate these categorizations. In the same way, physician-eugenicists advocated killing certain disabled or ill persons as a form of treatment for both society and patient long before the Nazis came to power. From the commencement of his political career, Hitler put his struggle against "enemies of the state" in medical rhetoric. In 1934, addressing the Reichstag, he declared, "I gave the order… to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning." The entire German nation and its National Socialist politicians learned to think and speak in such terms. Werner Best, Reinhard Heydrich's deputy, stated that the task of the police was "to root out all symptoms of disease and germs of destruction that threatened the political health of the nation… [In addition to Jews,] most [of the germs] were weak, unpopular and marginalized groups, such as gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, 'antisocials', 'work-shy', and 'habitual criminals'." In spite of all the evidence, people ignore or underappreciate the political implications of the pseudotherapeutic character of Nazism and of the use of medical metaphors in modern democracies. Dismissed as an "abuse of psychiatry", this practice is a controversial subject not because the story makes psychiatrists in Nazi Germany look bad, but because it highlights the dramatic similarities between pharmacratic controls in Germany under Nazism and those that have emerged in the US under the free market economy. Therapeutic state The "therapeutic state" is a phrase coined by Szasz in 1963. The collaboration between psychiatry and government leads to what Szasz calls the "therapeutic state", a system in which disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions are repressed ("cured") through pseudomedical interventions. Thus suicide, unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, and illegal drug use are all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured. When faced with demands for measures to curtail smoking in public, binge-drinking, gambling or obesity, ministers say that "we must guard against charges of nanny statism". The "nanny state" has turned into the "therapeutic state" where nanny has given way to counselor. Nanny just told people what to do; counselors also tell them what to think and what to feel. The "nanny state" was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive—and even more authoritarian. According to Szasz, "the therapeutic state swallows up everything human