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Stoned by Perscription Millions don’t die, of course, and for them these drugs work - for a while. They live (sort of) with the so-called side effects: Aspirin seriously depletes vitamin C making you vulnerable to infection. Diuretics deplete potassium vital for heart and muscle function. The Pill depletes folic acid and vitamin C and vastly increases your risk of cancer, as do other synthetic sex hormones. Antibiotics, taken frequently, kill favorable intestinal bacteria and cause systemic candidiasis, which can trigger both cancer and autoimmune disease. The SSRI antidepressants (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft etc.) deplete the B vitamins, the detoxicant Selenium, the brain food zinc, the nerve and enzyme food magnesium, the bone builder calcium, the cancer preventives L-gluthathione and vitamin C (some diabetic medications do all of this also). Many SSRIs are addictive, tend to ruin your sex life, most are toxic to the liver, and they can reduce blood flow to the brain as well. All statin drugs, meant to lower bad cholesterol to prevent heart attacks, deplete Co-enzyme Q 10, the very stuff your heart needs most to function, and they greatly increase your chance of developing one of the worst autoimmune diseases: Lupus. Arthritis medications, steroidal or non-steroidal, deplete all of these vital nutrients, some are suspected carcinogens, all deplete essential fatty acids making one vulnerable to depression, psychosis, skin diseases and more. The non-steroidal ones called NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) can cause irreversible and fatal intestinal bleeding. Steroids after prolonged use are no longer absorbed by the stripped cell receptors leaving only painkillers. They also cause osteoporosis. Among the “oops!” variety we find drugs like Thalidomide in the 1960s which caused tens of thousands of terrible birth defects before it was pulled off the market. In the 1980s the heart drug Tamocor killed literally thousands of people before it was pulled. CBC’s Ideas (March 13, 2001) aired the research into deadly drugs by Thomas Moore, a health policy analyst and author of Deadly Medicine. Moore observed, “So deeply embedded is the human desire to a have a pill …. [we] have suspended our normal critical faculties when it comes to drugs. We have something that every consumer should know is their right, and they never get it, and that is the right to informed consent.” Consent is messy when big bucks are at stake. The main players in Big Pharma, as these companies call themselves, are Merck (market value in 1998 at US $ 140 billion), Bristol-Myers-Squibb ($100 billion), Johnson & Johnson ($ 93 billion), DuPont ($ 87 billion), Dow Chemical ($21 billion), Monsanto ($33 billion). Four-fifth of Big Pharma’s total budget serves only one fifth of the world’s population. As Robinson observes, “The drugs that are needed are not necessarily the drugs that sell” because drugs that work have expired patents and are needed by four fifth of the world without money. I was stunned and fascinated (and absolutely sickened) by the fabulously researched and heart-poundingly well-written new bestseller by Jeffrey Simpson: Prescription Games and Eichenwald’s The Informant. Reading these requires a strong stomach and a serious case of lust for truth. For four decades these companies have consistently been first in return of revenues, assets, and equity, fifth in profit growth and fourth in total return for investors. Drug profits surpass all other Fortune 500 companies, and they have for forty years outperformed Standard & Poor’s 500 Index by 10% every year. All this mind-boggling wealth is made on drugs for cancer, cholesterol, smoking, hair loss, impotence, ulcers, menopause and depression. “Blockbuster drugs are harvested out of chronic diseases,” Simpson reports. These astronomical profits (1,000% mark-up over production cost is the norm) became supported by taxpayers money, which pays for most of the actual drug development costs, ever since former Prime Minister Mulroney’s 1993 Bill C-91. In 1997 the US allowed pharmaceuticals to advertise to the consumer directly, exponentially increasing profits. Harvard university’s Jerry Avorn proved that prescription habits by doctors are overwhelmingly influenced by drug reps. Research has further shown, that what the drug reps tell the doctors is mostly hot air. For example, to ensure that sales for Prozac, whose patent expires this year, don’t drop too painfully fast for the manufacturer Eli Lilly (also the world’s premier manufacturer of biological warfare materials), it is now recommended for Premenstrual Syndrome. (PMS is well known to be mediated by magnesium, progesterone and essential fatty acid deficiencies.) Pharmaceutical reps wine and dine doctors, send them on vacations, offer up to $ US 40,000 per patient recruited for studies, or as Dr. T. Rohland of Nova Scotia reported in The Medical Post (Feb.9, 1999): “If [the drug companies] can no longer appeal to our greed by giving us gifts, then a new tactic is needed. How about our raging uncontrollable hormones? Enter the gorgeous, young, model-type drug reps.” One doctor kept track of drug rep visits and mailings (Medical Post May 22, 2001) which came to 452 promotional encounters in one year. In Canada, only Quebec and British Columbia have legislation prohibiting pharmacies from selling information on doctors’ prescription patterns to Big Pharma. In all other provinces this information is available and also used to influence the licensing bodies, the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, to conduct witch hunts against doctors who treat diseases instead of being accessories to making patients into cash cows. The World Health Organization has recognized this “inherent conflict of interest between legitimate business goals and social needs” for a long time - to no effect. Former Health Canada scientists, Dr. Michelle Brill-Edwards, provides the reason for this. She told Robinson: “The dilemma of those in power is not ‘Do you serve citizens versus do you serve corporations?’ That’s a no-brainer. People in power serve the corporations because they have the money.” But sometimes the human conflict can happen right within a pharmaceutical company: Merck’s CEO was appalled to learn that millions of Africans go blind every year from river blindness, a disease easily prevented with a derivative of the cheap heart-worm medication we give our dogs. He ended up defying his own board of directors and angry investors and donating millions to stop this illness – successfully. Interestingly, these same companies also make the pesticides which cause all of the diseases in the first place, either directly by ingestion, skin contact or inhalation, or indirectly by dangerously depleting the nutrients in the foods. What an amazingly effective business strategy! Part of this strategy – logically – is to control research. This is a typical North American problem. In Europe most research is government funded and out of the reach of direct business interests. That’s why we get all that exciting research on nutritional and environmental medicine from Europe. In Canada and the US research is primarily funded by drug companies whose contracts always contain gag clauses preventing researchers from reporting negative findings, should these occur. Controlling research and clinical practice starts in the medical schools with the drug reps’ pizza parties. When MacMaster University, frustrated, declared their interns off limits to pharmaceutical reps, instructing these doctors of the future to read their research journals instead, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association threatened to withdraw all funding (Star, Dec. 3, 1999). Internationally famous blood researcher, Dr. Nancy Olivieri, found a drug to be toxic to the liver and wanted to change patient consent forms accordingly. Sick Children’s Hospital and the University of Toronto fired her to please the manufacturer Apotex. That backfired. Nobel laureates, Oxford and Harvard universities demanded an end to gag clauses. She was reinstated and this month the US based Civil Justice Foundation awarded her the prestigious Community Champion Award. The last recipient was Erin Brockovich. Canada seems to figure prominently in this resistance movement. Internationally renowned researcher Dr. David Healy, hired by U of T was fired before he started following a speech about the dangers of Prozac (suicide, violence, and brain damage). This one backfired even worse. The editors of the world’s most prestigious medical journals issued joint editorials on September 12th condemning Big Pharma’s attempt to control research and clinical practice. They will henceforth refuse publication of Big Pharma-funded research unless all the data are made available and gag clauses vanish. At the same time, 27 internationally famous medical scientists, among them 2 Nobel laureates, published a condemnation of U of T’s treatment of Dr. Healy, declaring its reputation “poisoned”. It is gratifying that all of this information you have read here is published by first-rate researchers and produced by mainstream publishers. The tide is turning against biotechnology and drugs. Perhaps war and drugs will not drive world economy forever. We are not as stupid as they think we are. What You Need To Know and Do:
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