Big Pharma scare tactics: How the pharmaceutical industry influences American consumers

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, especially in this case. Lloyd Grove, a columnist for the New York Daily News, says that the pharmaceutical lobby in the United States, a group called PhRMA, actually commissioned the writing of a fiction novel designed to scare Americans into avoiding prescription drugs from Canada. The book was supposed to tell a story of terrorists who altered prescription drugs from Canada in order to kill Americans who were buying them over the internet or crossing the border to buy them at lower prices. Bizarre, huh? What an interesting tactic to try to convince people to pay sky-high prices -- monopoly prices, in fact -- for prescription drugs in the United States. But that's only part of this story.
When the book project fizzled, the authors were offered $100,000 to keep quiet about the deal, says Grove. The book was also supposed to be "dumbed down" for women, because apparently women make up a large part of the prescription drug buyers in the United States, and the people in charge of this project wanted to make sure women could "understand it."
How disrespectful can this pharmaceutical industry be? To what lengths will it go to try to convince us that drugs from outside the United States are unsafe? I wouldn't be surprised if the industry actually commissioned a terrorist attack on drugs from Canada. Then it could say, "Look how unsafe drugs are from Canada! Now you have to buy them here in the United States."
Prescription drugs aren't safe, no matter where you get themPrescription drugs are actually the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Those are numbers that come out of conventional medicine. The actual number of deaths caused by prescription drugs in this country is actually much higher when you look at independent sources of information, such as the Death by Medicine report, authored in part by Dr. Gary Null. Just type "Death by Medicine" into any search engine, and you'll find that article.
I have a question, though: Suppose the pharmaceutical industry did commission a terrorist attack on the drugs coming from Canada, and suppose the American people started taking those drugs and dying. How would we know? How could we tell the difference between people dying from prescription drugs that are somehow tainted by terrorists, versus people dying from prescription drugs that are dangerous and toxic enough themselves?
People are dropping dead right now from prescription drugs in record numbers. In fact, according to my own analysis, prescription drugs are 16,400 percent more dangerous than terrorists. In other words, if you take all the prescription drug deaths since Sept.11, 2001 and compare it to the number of Americans who have been killed by terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks, the drugs are 16,400 percent more dangerous than terrorists. Drugs are killing more people than terrorists, murderers, car accidents, plane accidents, swimming pool accidents and infant deaths combined. In terms of what's killing people in this country, nothing compares to prescription drugs.
We have a memorial in Washington, D.C. for all the veterans who died in the Vietnam War. It's a wall, and it's a fairly sizeable wall. It would take you some time to go through all the names on that wall. But if we had a wall built to honor all the American citizens who have been killed by FDA-approved prescription drugs, that wall would look like the Great Wall of China. It would stretch on for miles. You would never be able to read every single name on that wall unless you dedicated a couple of years to doing so, because prescription drugs are killing people in this country at a rate that dwarfs the number of deaths in the Vietnam War.
Big Pharma wants to scare consumers away from prescription drug alternatives In fact, what is happening in this country today is a chemical holocaust. We have drugs that are killing our children, causing them to commit violent acts and suicide. We have drugs that are killing middle-aged people and, of course, we have drugs that are killing our senior citizens in record numbers. What does the drug industry want to do about it? It wants to make sure that you're afraid of alternatives.
The industry message is this: "Don't you dare touch those herbs. Don't you dare think about vitamins, and don't make the mistake of thinking you can get nutrition from food. You need our prescription drugs to keep you healthy. You need to take these drugs every day for the rest of your life. And just in case you might think buying drugs from somewhere else as a way to get a good deal, we'll scare you with language about terrorists somehow tainting prescription drugs from Canada."
By the way, this is not the first time we have heard that language. People in the conventional medical industry brought this up more than a year ago. They said that drugs from Canada were dangerous because terrorists could attack Americans by tainting the prescription drug supply in Canada. They must have really great imaginations to come up with this stuff. It should be the first topic in the book, 101 Ways to Scare Americans into Doing What You Want Them to Do.
In this country, we have all types of fear at work in order to convince you to do something the people in charge want you to do, like giving up your civil liberties or paying ridiculous prices for prescription drugs in the monopoly market in the United States.
Profiteering and social engineeringSome prescription drugs, by the way, are marked up as much as 55,000 percent over the cost of the raw materials. In most industries, that would be called criminal profiteering. In the prescription drug industry, I guess it's just called a return on investment. Shareholders are happy. The board members are happy, and that includes a lot of people who have high-powered positions in Washington. One of our biggest drug companies, Eli Lilly, was once home to people like George Bush, Sr. and Donald Rumsfeld, a man with a strong history in various food and drug giants. There are very strong ties between pharmaceutical companies and the Bush administration. I think that's why you see such a strong push to convince people they have to buy prescription drugs here in the United States at ridiculous prices to treat fictitious diseases that don't even exist, and then stay on those drugs for a lifetime.
The report that the pharmaceutical lobby tried to fund a fiction novel designed to scare Americans away from buying drugs from Canada doesn't surprise me. I think this industry would do anything to make more money. I think it would put people's lives at risk, and I think it has done this and will continue to do so. I think it would fabricate fictitious diseases ("disease mongering") and market those to the American public to try to get people to take more drugs that they don't need. In fact, I think it would collude or conspire with federal regulators to make sure there is a drug-friendly environment in this country that discredits alternatives.
You can call it a conspiracy if you want, but I just call it straight old-fashioned corporate greed. It's all about money, and there's a lot of money changing hands in the drug racket now operating in this country. It's a swell deal if you're the guy at the top, pocketing the take, and if you don't have any ethics. Unfortunately, that's who we have running a lot of the corporations and government departments in this country today. It's sad, but true.
Public education can change the greedy U.S. drug racketAll of this doesn't mean I'm a pessimist. I'm actually a cautious optimist. I think we can change things for the better through public education. My aim is to help people realize how atrocious the pharmaceutical industry is and take action to make positive changes.
Obviously, we need a whole new system of medicine in this country. We need to hold people responsible for the crimes against humanity that are taking place right now in the pharmaceutical industry. I think a number of individuals, CEOs and legislators need to do a little prison time, and clearly the FDA needs wholesale reform from top to bottom so that it can once again act like an agency concerned with protecting the public rather than protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
I think we can make changes for the better. I think we can help people realize the healing power of foods if we teach the fact that foods contain all the medicine we need and that healthy, unprocessed foods make most prescription drugs obsolete. If we can talk about nutrition and the healing power of natural sunlight and physical exercise and drinking pure water, then we can change this world for the better. We can make a difference, and we can move past this era of the dark ages of modern medicine we're living in now. I think that, together, through public education, truth, honesty and integrity, we can unleash a new golden age of nutrition and healing.
That's what I wish to be a part of. That's why I'm bringing you information like this. Even though it may sound scary and negative at first, I just want to open your eyes to what's going on out there, so that I can invite you to a whole new realm of healing where you can live life free of chronic disease, free of fear, free of corruption and free of medical bankruptcies. You can be healthy, happy, energetic, energized and creative. You can be a super healthy human being if you turn to healing foods and do away with conventional medicine -- the "drugs and surgery" approach to "managing disease," which just manages your disease, without actually helping you get rid of it.
I'm all about pointing us in a new direction and continuing to learn from nature. My work is about helping us awaken to the idea that we can be healthier individuals. We can have healthier families, communities, cities, nations and a healthier world if we just realize what's going on and make some positive changes in a meaningful direction.

Psychiatry and disease mongering: Road Rage Disorder is latest spontaneously "discovered" disease

Disease mongering has reached a new level of ridiculousness with the widely-reported announcement that millions of American now have undiagnosed Road Rage Disorder, also sometimes called Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED). Desperate to scrounge up new diseases that can be treated with high-profit prescription drugs, Big Pharma and its disease-pushing sidekick, psychiatry, is now pulling diseases out of thin air, making them up as it goes along, and hoping enough impressionable consumers (and journalists) can be hoodwinked into thinking every fictitious disease is actually real.
Road Rage Disorder is merely the latest disease quackery drummed up by the pharmaceutical industry. Many people don't know this, but Big Pharma actually hires psychiatrists to invent, then publicize new "diseases." They actually sit around in rooms, brainstorming new disease ideas and figuring out how to convince the public that those diseases exist. That's where they come up with junk science statements like, "This is the most common disease you've never heard of!"
Inventing disease for profitThe psychiatric community has now become the disease invention branch of Big Pharma. Psychiatrists dream up disorders, and drug companies market the "treatment" that just happens to have been recently FDA approved. Notice how new diseases or disorders only get publicized and advertised after the FDA approves a Big Pharma drug to treat them? These diseases apparently spontaneously afflict huge numbers of Americans only in the days following the FDA approval of any drug that might treat such diseases. Imagine the odds.
To think, all these years, we've all been running around with Intermittent Explosive Disorder and we didn't even know it! The horrors!
The crooks running this medical scam are, of course, the drug company executives and psych doctors who have apparently decided they will now do absolutely anything to sell more drugs, including labeling perfectly healthy people as sick. As the number of truly ill people in society is limited, Big Pharma evil geniuses have figured out that the only way to increase their customer base is to start selling drugs to people who aren't sick. And the quickest way to do that is through disease mongering -- inventing, then marketing non-existent diseases to a gullible population that has grown far too comfortable with the idea that every human behavior is now a disease.
This is how we get Road Rage Disorder, Restless Legs Syndrome (an extremely rare condition that drug companies are now trying to push onto half the population) and even the idea that menstruation is now a "disorder" that can be treated with drugs to stop a woman's natural cycles from being expressed. Merely being a woman, apparently, is a state of ongoing disease and biological dysfunction according to Big Pharma's disease pushers.
It's so outrageous, and based on such obvious non-scientific psychobabble, that only a complete fool would actually buy into it. Yet the public, the FDA and the mainstream media are currently exhibiting zero skepticism about these wholly fictitious diseases. Newspapers, magazines and broadcast news programs continue parroting headlines and press release handed to them by the public relations firms bankrolled by Big Pharma. There is no science here; no scrutiny, no genuine journalism and nothing resembling "evidence-based medicine." It's just plain old hucksterism dressed up to look like a mental health discovery.
Got angry? You have a mental disorder.The whole thing makes me so mad that I could slam my head into the wall. And that, of course, qualifies me as having Intermittent Explosive Disorder, a disease based on such flimsy definitions that you can be qualified as "ill" by simply having three major anger outbursts in your entire life! You read that right: Three bouts of anger, over your entire life, can get you labeled as having this so-called "disease" and put on powerful psychotropic drugs for life.
Is there anyone who hasn't experienced at least three episodes of anger in their life? Let's see... there's the snotty girl who stuffed a slushy snowball down my pants in the third grade, that's one. There was the idiot who slammed into my car at a stoplight because he was on prescription sleeping pills, that's two. And then there was the embarrassing incident involving a circus bear, a unicycle and three flaming juggling sticks that I'd rather not talk about. That's three. Gee, I guess I really am suffering from IED.
You might recognize the three letters, by the way: IED also refers to Improvised Explosive Devices that are killing soldiers in Iraq. So IED is both a road-side bomb and an anger disorder. Sort of fitting, it seems, because when IEDs actually explode and kill American troops in Iraq, the surviving soldiers understandably get more than a bit ticked off and have been known to go door to door shooting civilians in a vengeful rampage. That behavior may actually qualify as some sort of disorder. That's real violence. Going door to door killing women and children with military rifles probably qualifies you as a whacko under any system of medicine. But saying you have Road Rage Disorder because some psychiatrist force-fed a false diagnosis into your impressionable, defenseless brain only qualifies you as gullible.
Pseudoscientific psych surveysHow, exactly, did psychiatrists actually come up with this stunning "discovery" that 16 million Americans suffer from this new disease, IED? Get this: They conducted a survey.
The survey asked American adults if they had ever experienced three anger outbursts in their entire life. Not surprisingly, a whole lot of people said they had. From this flimsy evidence -- and this alone! -- the Archives of General Psychiatry (a medical journal that takes loads of money from drug companies) printed the survey results that hype this fictitious disease.
Apparently, surveys now provide all the evidence needed by conventional medicine to scare half the population into believing they suffer from some new, mysterious disease. Promoters of drugs and surgery are proud to proclaim Western medicine is "evidence-based medicine," but they never admit what that so-called evidence is really based on. In this case, it's based on a flimsy survey that was obvious designed from the get-go to "discover" some new disease that could be hyped up in the media.
It's downright sinister, I say. It's a recipe of instilling fear in the public in order to sell more drugs to people who simply don't need them.
So I have a new idea here. Stay with me on this. We're all going to get rich. I'm going to send a survey to thousands of American adults and ask if they've ever experienced hesitations in their breathing, like holding their breath, shallow breathing or rapid breathing (such as during exercise).
When I get the survey results, I'm going to tabulate them and declare that 25 million Americans now suffer from Intermittent Breathing Disoder (IBD), a disease that's "very common even though you've never heard of it!"
Then I'm going to get fast-track FDA approval on drugs to treat IBD. I'll buy full-page ads in medical journals, bribe a few psychiatrists with "consulting fees," and whip out some press releases that will be faxed to all the national newspapers and magazines. Drug sales will skyrocket in no time! Invest in my IBD company now, and we'll all get rich!
Sounds like a con, right? Yet it's exactly what's happening right now with Restless Legs Syndrome, Road Rage Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder and even Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Every one of these is utterly bogus. Completely fictitious. Designed for one sinister purpose: To sell drugs to people who don't need them.
As reported in one news story, "Experts claim IED is caused by inadequate production of serotonin in the brain, which regulates our moods. It is felt that treatment with antidepressants can help the condition."
Ah. Antidepressants. No such disorder is ever publicized, you see, unless there's a "treatment" already available and approved by the FDA. Modern mental health has nothing to do with actually helping people and everything to do with marketing more drugs. No mental disorders exist except those for which medications are readily available.
No pathological basis for diseaseHave you ever heard of doctors using a survey to come up with disease definitions? Of course not. A real disease has some observable pathology: A microbe, a physical deformity, a change in chemistry, a measurable malfunction... something that can be used by doctors to actually diagnose the condition.
But none of these psychiatric disorders express any observable pathology. Take IED, for instance:
Can you weigh IED? Touch it? See it? Smell it?No.
Can you see IED or its effects under a microscope?No.
Can you measure IED with a blood test?No.
Is there a carrier for IED such as a virus, bacterium, fungus, prion or spore?No.
Can you find IED in the genetic code? A CAT scan? An MRI?No. No. No.
Behavior is a choiceYou see, there is no such thing as IED, or bi-polar disorder, or ADHD. These fictitious diseases are diagnosed through interview questions by a psychiatrist and are based purely on behavior, not pathology. And behavior is a choice, friends, not a disease.
That's a big statement, so take it in slowly: Behavior is a choice, not a disease. I fully realize that believing this requires taking responsibility for your own actions... and that's not something many people really want to do. It's easier to accept a label and blame everything on some fictitious disorder.
Kids get away with it all the time. At school, they proclaim, "I'm ADHD!" So they get to take tests with an open book. But at home, they play Halo on the Xbox for six hours without even taking a restroom break. How's that for mental focus? If they have an attention disorder, how can they play Halo for six hours?
Many people, you see, don't want to admit that behavior is a choice simply because that would require acting like an adult. Harsh, but true.
The catch-22 on mental disordersPsychiatrists don't believe behavior is a choice, either. They believe behavior is a disease, especially behavior that doesn't fit in with the crowd or that questions authority. They even have a name for that one, too: Oppositional Defiance Disorder, described on page 100 of the DSM-IV-TR manual. I'm looking at it right now, and it says this "disease" is characterized by, "...persistent stubbornness, resistance to directions, and unwillingness to compromise, give in, or negotiate with adults or peers."
So if you don't compromise and give in to your peers, you have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Well count me in on this one, too, because I'm not about to join the uninformed masses and do what doctors and psychiatrists insist people should do.
It's a clever Catch-22 medical con, isn't it? If you give in and submit to their disease mongering, they trap you with such sweeping definitions of disease that practically everyone will eventually be put on drugs. But if you resist and claim that modern psychiatry is nonsense, and you don't buy into their pseudoscientific psychobabble, they can label you with a defiance disorder.
Either way, according to modern psychiatry, virtually everyone is "sick" and needs treatment. This astonishing claim is the cornerstone of the psychiatric mantra you often find repeated in news stories: The plea for treatment. It goes something like this: "Millions of people have this disorder, but are going without treatment. We must find a way to treat them!" The implication, of course, is that all patients should be "treated" because we don't want people to go without treatment, do we?
But it isn't treatment. It's the exploitation of a human being to generate corporate profits.
Consensus hallucinationsThe idea that all these psychiatric disorders exist at all isn't based on good science, or genuine pathology, or anything with scientific merit. Rather, these diseases only "exist" in modern society because of consensus hallucination.
What is consensus hallucination? It's when a large group of people all agree to hallucinate something that isn't there. IED doesn't exist in the real world, of course. You can't find it in nature, nor in the body or brain tissues of a human being. It only exists as a false concept, an idea that is being hyped as real even though it isn't.
With enough media coverage and advertising, the public can be convinced to hallucinate practically anything: Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Housing prices will keep going up forever. The U.S. economy is strong. Imperialism is freedom. And most of the population suffers from a variety of mental disorders that must be treated with psychotropic drugs. These are all consensus hallucinations. There are many more, in case you're curious.
During the dot-com boom, the consensus hallucination was that PE ratios meant nothing, that the laws of economics had changed, and that everybody was going to get rich selling each other little scraps of paper with increasingly large numbers written on them. In the cheap-money housing boom right now, the consensus hallucination is that buying a home, no matter how high the price, is always a good investment because home prices will rise forever. They won't, of course. This boom will bust much like the dot-com boom. But that reality doesn't keep people from investing in the consensus hallucination.
Modern psychiatric medicine is based almost entirely on the invention and marketing of consensus hallucinations. And as long as they can get away with it, there's no stopping the disease mongers from exploring even greater degrees of scientific fraud in their efforts to market drugs to people who don't need them.
Every bodily function and behavior may be declared a disorderHow far will the drug companies go before lawmakers, journalists and citizens come to their senses and finally ban direct-to-consumer drug advertising? You can expect them to try anything to sell more drugs. No bodily function, emotion or behavior is safe from Big Pharma's disease mongering racket.
It won't be long before we hear about IFD. That's Intermittent Farting Disorder, in case you were wondering. It's the early expression of CFD, Continuous Farting Disorder, which is far more dangerous. Farting, you see, is a disease. You can tell by the way it makes you dizzy and socially unacceptable. Farting, the studies show, actually leads to Social Anxiety Disorder and, in extreme cases, paranoia. Fortunately, there are drugs available to help you.
Buying in to the hallucinationSince when did virtually the entire medical community, the public, the FDA and the press all buy into the Big Pharma hype that says every human action must be chemically assisted? We all need drugs, we're told, to pee, defecate, fall asleep, wake up or get an erection. We need drugs to feel happy, confident, sexy or sane. Only through drugs, we're told, can we stop pain, socialize with peers, control blood pressure, gain mental concentration, lower cholesterol or prevent cancer.
This is the con that drug companies want us to believe. They want us to think that we're born diseased, powerless to take control over our own health, and that we must rely on doctors, drugs and radical surgical procedures to "manage" all our metabolic processes.
I tell you, there is no greater con in the history of the world than this con being perpetrated by Big Pharma and all the major players in conventional medicine: The FDA, medical journals, psychiatry, med schools and even the mainstream media (which, remember, accepts hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies, thanks to the fact that direct-to-consumer drug advertising is still absurdly legal in this country).
You want the blunt truth on all this? Here it is: Healthy people take no drugs, period. Taken for anything other than short-term acute conditions, drugs make you sick, not healthy. And drugs that mess with your head make you mentally sick. The more drugs you take, the more side effects you're going to start experiencing, and you'll be trapped in the racket of conventional medicine and its toxic medications.
If you aren't as healthy as you want to be, look to your diet and exercise. That's where the root cause of virtually every major degenerative disease is really found. You do not have a "deficiency" of brain chemicals or anything else conventional medicine is trying to push on you. Don't fall for the false authority, the pseudoscience, the psychobabble, the drug pushing and the disease mongering that now defines modern medicine in the West.
Mental health is a genuine problem for psychiatristsAlthough IED, ADHD and many other so-called diseases are consensus hallucinations, the obvious question is: Are there genuine mental health disorders?
Sure there are. And the behavior of modern psychiatrists probably demonstrates several such genuine disorders. What kind of doctor would exploit patients for his own financial gain, cursing them with the label of some fictitious disease and using the power of placebo against them? Psych doctors, that's who.
I've seen homeless people wandering the streets talking to themselves about things that don't exist. But at least they're not hurting anyone. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, talk to each other about things that don't exist (like IED) and then go out and push that consensus hallucination onto the world, drugging up untold numbers of Americans on medicines that can only harm them.
So who's crazier, the homeless guy who harms no one, or the psychiatrist who puts perfectly normal patients on powerful psychotropic drugs that they don't need? By any reasonable standard, I'd say the inmates are running the asylum in modern medicine. The psychiatrists are crazier than the patients they're diagnosing with fictitious disease. We've let this dark branch of conventional medicine run amok, and now drug companies run psychiatry.
Don't believe me? Just consider the recent finding that one hundred percent of those psychiatrists who wrote the behavior disorders guidelines in the DSM-IV manual (the psychiatry "bible") have undisclosed financial ties to drug companies. Not ninety percent, not ninety-five percent, but one hundred percent.
And, unbelievably, they insist there's no conflict of interest even though they're taking money from the very companies who financially benefit from their disease mongering. How's that for classic self delusion?
What real brain medicine looks likeYou want real brain medicine? It doesn't come in a pill, and it's not made by a drug company.
Real brain medicine includes sunshine (which actually enhances brain chemistry), exercise, fish oil supplements, omega-3 oils and nutritionally dense fruits like blueberries, goji berries and pomegranates. Real brain medicine comes from nature, not drug companies, and it includes things like bilberry, camu camu berries and astaxanthin.
Psychiatrists don't have a clue about real brain medicine. These nutritionally illiterate hucksters don't even believe that food has anything at all to do with mental health -- an idea so preposterous that only delusional health professional could possibly believe it. And yet it's widely believed throughout psychiatry today: Food and mental health are not related, they declare.
Astonishing.
Who's qualified to talk about mental health anyway?Critics of my criticism of psychiatry will no doubt say I'm not qualified to talk about mental health. In fact, I am unique qualified to talk about this subject because I possess genuine objectivity (I take no money from drug companies, unlike virtually 100% of psychiatrists) and clear-headed thinking (because I take no drugs whatsoever).
How many psychiatrists are there who can say they have never taken money or gifts from any drug company, and that they take absolutely no drugs themselves? (No prescription drugs, no caffeine, no sugar, no alcohol, nicotine, etc.) The answer is, well, just about zero, except for the whistleblowers in the Critical Psychiatric Network and other reform-oriented medical groups. And so the majority of psychiatrists themselves can't even attain clear-headed thinking because they're influenced by drug company money and distorted by their own substance abuse habits.
The few who have managed clear thinking on this issue are now increasingly speaking out against their own industry! I've been in touch with several psychiatrists who are so outraged at the lies and corruption they see in their industry that they're looking for ways to blow the whistle on this scam. To anyone who can think with even a little clarity, the con is obvious: Drug companies bankroll psychiatry, and in return, psychiatrists invent new diseases to enrich drug companies.
It's a classic conspiracy, right here in front of us. And for the moment, they're actually getting away with it!
You can help stop the insanity and save yourself (and your children, perhaps) from being diagnosed with yet another fictitious mental disorder. Take this article and post it on your website (with author credit and a link back, please), or forward to friends. Also, visit www.StopDrugAds.org, a grassroots campaign to end direct-to-consumer drug advertising.
Having a bad day is perfectly normalBy the way, if you had a bad day, got angry at a crazy driver on the highway, couldn't fall asleep one night, forgot where you put your keys or felt nervous at a social gathering, there's nothing wrong with you.
It's called "life." Sometimes stuff happens. Every day isn't perfect, and if you think that chemicals will make your life better, you're kidding yourself. That old slogan, "Better living through chemistry" was a cruel joke.
Don't fall for the con of psychiatric medicine and its incessant disease mongering. There's nothing wrong with your head. You just need what we all need: Less stress, more exercise, better nutrition (especially the minerals), more time with nature and loving, supporting relationships. It isn't complicated.
But if reality sounds too challenging, I'm sure there's a psychiatrist willing to medicate you instead. You can always choose to let the chemicals run your thoughts and emotions, sleep-walking through life like the rest of the zombies who have surrendered their free will to psychiatric medicine.
Psychiatrists are promising mental paradise, but delivering mental prison. Don't become enslaved by chemicals.

Government's Medicare drug benefit program is an unmitigated disaster

Do you want to know what happens when a government that cares nothing about the people gets put in charge of administering a drug benefit program? You get an unmitigated disaster, and that's what we're seeing today with the Medicare prescription drug benefit program. This program, which is just legalized theft from one group of American taxpayers to another group of American consumers (mostly the elderly), originally promised to give people discounts on prescription drugs.
The program was supposed to cost "only" a couple hundred billion dollars. It turns out that, as usual, the politicians were lying. The drugs being offered through this program are not offered at much of a discount at all, and the program is going to cost $750 billion over the next 10 years. That's three quarters of $1 trillion. Scratch that. As of this writing, the figure has now escalated to a whopping $1.2 trillion according to new figures from the White House, as reported in the Washington Post.
For those who don't immediately grasp the difference between million, billion and trillion (they all just run together when the federal government is talking about spending, don't they?), here' what it looks like: $1,200,000,000,000.00. That's over $4,200 per person living in the United States, and it's all a windfall handout to Big Pharma.
The best part -- that is to say the most entertaining part -- is that the program is so confusing, most people who try to participate in it can't figure out which plan to choose. It's administered through a partnership between private industry and government, and participants in this program must choose which plan they want to be on.
Each plan covers a certain number of prescription drugs and offers certain rip-off prices. All the prices, of course, are sky-high profiteering markups that would be considered criminal in any other industry. These are the highest prices in the world for these drugs, and yet somehow, consumers think they're getting a discount because it's a little bit less than what they might have been paying retail.
However, six out of 10 participants in this program are saying they're not saving any money at all. It sort of makes you wonder what the point of this whole thing is. The big news is that this program is so darn confusing that the federal government had to expand its toll-free help hotline from a couple hundred staff members to 4,000 staff members just to answer questions from senior citizens who can't figure out which plan to join. The administration of the plan is falling flat on its face as well, because when senior citizens go to pharmacies and try to buy prescription drugs, it turns out that their name isn't in the computer where it's supposed to be.
The plan isn't working out how it was supposed to, people can't get their drugs, and they are panicking. All of this demonstrates what happens when you put the federal government in charge of "negotiating" drug prices with the very same for-profit corporations that contribute enormous sums of money to the political party currently in the White House.
The real purpose behind the Medicare benefit programThink about the administrative overhead, the paperwork, the fraud and corruption that will inevitably crop up in this program. Think about the time wasted by all the people involved in this system. What's the purpose of it? Is it really just to help senior citizens?
This plan really has two purposes: First, it makes President Bush popular by making sure he has lots of handouts for senior citizens, a demographic that happens to have a high number of active voters. Secondly, it's a big Bush handout to campaign supporters, notably Big Pharma. You see, drug companies have supported the Bush administration for years, and this is a great way to thank them, by actually having the government steal money from taxpayers and send that money to pharmaceutical companies. It's legalized inter-generational theft.
Want to get elected? Offer big handouts and entitlements to votersI'm always amused when one generation of taxpayers or voters steals money from another group. It's usually the older generation stealing money from the younger, because it's a lot easier to pass on the cost to your children or grandchildren than to actually pay it yourself. Politicians are getting very good these days at making people believe they can actually get something for nothing. In fact, getting elected has really become a competition of who can offer the biggest handouts of all.
Even Arnold Schwarzenegger got swept up into this recently. After the defeat of four different propositions that were going to introduce some fiscal sanity to the State of California, he returned to the podium and announced, "Message received," and then proceeded to detail all kinds of new spending programs that would put the State of California even deeper into debt, and the voters loved it!
That's what the voters want you see -- more spending and less accountability. And why not? The government has been spending more money than it has for decades, so why can't the voters do it too? While we're at it, let's vote ourselves some free prescription drugs. Isn't democracy a wonderful thing?
I call it the tyranny of the masses, because whatever the majority wants to do -- no matter how unethical, irrational or illegal it may have been before -- it's suddenly justified under law. I don't know about you, but if my grandpa broke into my house, stole my wallet and used it to go out and buy Viagra at the local pharmacy, I'd be upset about that, but somehow when the whole nation does it, it's okay.
Welcome to America, and remember, now that this program is in place, there's going to be competition among presidential candidates to see who can offer the biggest health care handouts. I predict the next such debate will be about something even bigger than just a drug handout. It will be a national health care plan that offers mandatory screenings for all sorts of diseases so that every person in America -- newborn, child, adult -- can be diagnosed with something and "treated" with pharmaceuticals that will make the drug companies even more filthy rich than they are already.
Think about it: Do you want the federal government in charge of mandating what kinds of treatments your child might get for depression, a mental disorder or a learning disability? The government has no interest in prevention. We invest almost nothing in prevention in this country. The money will all go to prescription drugs. The government has no interest in teaching people how to actually prevent or reverse chronic diseases. It only has an interest in treating people who are managing their symptoms in a way that keeps the pharmaceutical industry profitable.
The best option for free-thinking people is to avoid this whole system altogether. Live outside conventional medicine like I do and like many Americans have chosen to do. We're healthier, happier and guess what? We have more money because we didn't spend it all on overpriced prescription drugs that you can buy anywhere else in the world for pennies-on-the-dollar.
Do you know why drugs are so expensive in this country? It's because we don't have a free-market system when it comes to drugs. Everything else is free-market. You can buy a car from Japan, you can buy T-shirts made in Mexico, you can buy computer memory chips from Korea, or you can buy plastic spatulas from Hong Kong, but how dare you try to buy prescription drugs from anywhere except the monopoly-controlled U.S. market? How dare you? That's why I call it a drug racket. It's a monopoly racket defended by the FDA, Big Pharma and corrupt legislators who get reelected thanks to campaign contributions from drug companies.
It's a simple system, but hardly anybody is willing to tell the truth about it, and this big Bush handout -- this Medicare drug benefit program -- only really benefits the drug companies. It doesn't benefit the senior citizens, and it doesn't benefit the taxpayers who are footing the bill. It certainly doesn't benefit any honest, hardworking American whose income continues to dwindle under the assault of do-gooder government programs like this one. It really only benefits Big Pharma, and, of course, that was its purpose.
The Medicare drug benefit program is really just another clever way to extract productivity from U.S. taxpayers, and it's working extremely well. Practically no one in the mainstream press has noticed any of what's really going on here. We see all sorts of articles about how terrible the system is, but I haven't seen any articles on real solutions.
You know what the real solutions are? They don't start with drugs; they start with food. If you want to get people healthy, it's very easy: Change what they eat. You can cure diabetes in three weeks by changing what you eat. You can cure virtually every type of cancer with changes in diet and nutritional supplementation. You can reverse Alzheimer's disease. You can reverse osteoporosis. You can reverse depression. You can reverse and eliminate all of these chronic degenerative diseases by changing what you eat, how you exercise, your exposure to environmental toxins, your stress levels and by availing yourself of natural sunlight and fresh water and air.
You'll never hear that from the federal government, and you won't hear that as a benefit program, because no one profits from it. No one profits when the U.S. population is healthy. Pharmaceutical corporations only make money when you're sick and when you stay sick.
I'm curious as to what program they'll come up with the next. How can they top this one? I can't wait for the next presidential election to see who's going to come up even more grandiose lies and try to convince even more voters that they can get something for nothing because "the gub'ment will pay for it."

FDA's own scientists report pattern of intimidation, censorship and scientific fraud that undermines public safety

In a truly astonishing survey just released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Food and Drug Administration's own scientists describe the agency as an environment of intimidation, censorship and scientific fraud. A survey of 997 FDA scientists revealed that forty percent feared "retaliation" for voicing safety concerns over prescription drugs in public. Over one-third of the scientists didn't even feel safe expressing safety concerns inside the agency, behind closed doors!

Intimidation and censorship have been well documented at the FDA, and this survey adds further weight to the evidence that the FDA has been utterly co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry and now serves Big Pharma's commercial interests rather than anything resembling a commitment to honest science or public safety. Time and time again, it has been the courageous actions of independent FDA scientists, taking a stand despite intense intimidation and censorship from the agency's top officials, who have warned the U.S. public about dangerous prescription drugs like Vioxx.

Literally tens of millions of Americans have been harmed by FDA negligence over the last decade, and well over one million have been killed by FDA-approved prescription drugs -- many of which were approved based on fraudulent scientific data the FDA conveniently chose to overlook. Through its abandonment of public safety and scientific integrity, the FDA has now become the single greatest threat to the health and safety of the American people, dwarfing any threat posed by terrorists.

The FDA's nuclear bomb

Imagine a nuclear bomb detonating over Seattle, Washington. A hundred thousand citizens might be instantly killed, and two million (or more) could be seriously injured from the fallout. As horrific as that image may seem, this is what happens in America every single year from prescription drugs under the watch of the FDA. Allowing the FDA to continue operating as it does today kills as many Americans as detonating a nuclear weapon over a major U.S. city each year.

FDA, Merck may have conspired to discredit whistleblower, says U.S. Senator

Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has asked the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department to investigate whether the FDA conspired with drug maker Merck to discredit the safety findings of FDA drug safety official Dr. David Graham.

In a letter to Inspector General Daniel Levinson, Grassley charges that documentation of the FDA and Merck shows the two joined forces to discredit Graham, who "blew the whistle" on the painkiller Vioxx, which Merck voluntarily withdrew from the market following a study that revealed its potential dangers.

"It is no secret that Dr. Graham was and is a critic of the FDA," Grassley says. "However, that does not mean that the FDA should scheme with drug sponsors to discredit its own employees." Grassley says the FDA must maintain a "clear, bright line between the regulated and the regulator."

Susan Bro, spokeswoman for the FDA, had no comment, though Merck -- which is currently facing more than 16,000 Vioxx-related lawsuits -- issued a statement saying that it has the "right to express our views when we believe information others have presented is not fair and balanced."

However, Grassley alleges that the campaign waged against Graham by Merck and the FDA goes far beyond the drug maker's right to "express (its) views," citing as evidence handwritten notes made by a Merck employee who documented an Oct. 13, 2004 conversation with an FDA official who mentioned an "opportunity to get (the) message out" on Graham.

In a May 2006 deposition, Graham said he was "quite shocked" to learn of some of the alleged smear campaign tactics waged against him.

New FDA leadership has strong ties to Big Pharma, Wall Street

Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to pay more than $41 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 40 states alleging the company inflated the prices of cancer drugs and other pharmaceuticals.

The U.S. Justice Department, the National Association of Medicaid Fraud Control Units and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced yesterday that GlaxoSmithKline would pay about $1.5 million to New York's Medicaid program, $940,000 for allegedly over-pricing an antibiotic, as well as $750,000 to Spitzer's office for the cost of the investigation.

GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman Mary Anne Rhyne says the company has settled the case "without admitting wrongdoing, to put this historical matter behind it," and claims that testimony showed that states and health plans chose to buy the company's drugs at its set prices, "although it has been widely known for years that (average wholesale price) exceeds the prices actually paid by physicians, pharmacies and others." The company expects to shell out a total of $70 million, which will be covered by its existing legal reserve, Rhyne says.

The settlement includes restitutions that will be paid to New York, California, Connecticut, Nevada, Montana and Arizona, as well as a $40 million fund for the needy and poor who use Medicaid and New York's Elderly Pharmaceutical Insurance Coverage plan.

"Our lawsuit helped stop a long-standing practice that inflated the cost of drugs for people suffering from cancer and cheated the Medicaid system," Spitzer said on Thursday. "Today's settlement provides significant restitution for consumers and the Medicaid program."

Critics of pharmaceutical companies say that since GlaxoSmithKline admitted no wrongdoing by settling the cases brought against it, the company is allowed to remain on the list of approved drug companies that can continue selling pharmaceuticals to states, opening up more opportunities for wrongdoing in the future.

"Once again, we see that GlaxoSmithKline is able to buy its way out of a price fixing scheme that was, in my view, clearly fraudulent," said Mike Adams, a Big Pharma watchdog. "The message to pharmaceutical companies is clear: Defraud states and governments as long as you want, because even when you get caught, you'll never have to face any real consequences."

Big Tobacco racketeering ruling mirrors future Big Pharma prosecutions

or decades, major tobacco companies have lied about the risks of smoking. A federal judge has now ruled that Big Tobacco engaged in decades of conspiracy and civil fraud, scoring a major victory for the Dept. of Justice, which sued tobacco firms seven years ago.

It has taken decades for this legal chess match to play out against Big Tobacco, and yet what we're witnessing today may foreshadow a nearly identical situation currently brewing: Big Pharma and its own racketeering behavior.

Consider the similarities between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma:

• Both are led by powerful corporations with heavy influence in Washington.
• Both sell products that were heavily pushed by doctors (yes, doctors once pushed cigarettes in TV and magazine advertisements).
• The products of both companies injure and kill huge numbers of people.
• The manufacturers of both products routinely deny their products cause any kind of harm.
• Both have been caught burying clinical trials, bribing doctors and distorting science to fit their marketing agendas.
• Both routinely engaged in anti-competitive practices designed to unfairly eliminate competing products imported from other countries.
• Both rely heavily on consumer advertising (cigarettes used to be advertised on television) to brainwash people into thinking their products are good for them.
• Both industries lack ethics or any real sense of value for human life, choosing to exploit lives in order to generate corporate profits.
• Both have been caught trying to intimidate and censor their own scientists who dared to go public with the truth about their products.
• Both engaged in deceptive advertising and marketing tactics.
• Both targeted young children in order to create a new generation of repeat customers.

The similarities are downright spooky. But one big difference is that Big Tobacco peaked many years ago and has been on the downward spiral ever since. Big Pharma's power and influence is still peaking, and the tide has not yet turned against it (although that is beginning to happen this year).

In time, Big Pharma executives will be charged with serious crimes and prosecuted by the Dept. of Justice, much like Big Tobacco today. States will sue to recover billions of dollars in health care costs caused by dangerous pharmaceuticals. Doctors will someday shun promoting pharmaceuticals just as they now shun cigarettes, and just like Big Tobacco, Big Pharma will look to foreign markets to push their drugs as the U.S. market dries up.

From one generation to the next, the years may change, but the scams of powerful corporations don't. It's always the same scam: Pushing dangerous products onto people who don't need them, promoted through false advertising and the corruption of gullible scientists and federal regulators. Big Pharma is the evil twin brother of Big Tobacco, and someday taking drugs for things like high cholesterol or "social anxiety disorder" will seem just as stupid as smoking cigarettes.

Michael Moore's "Sicko" documentary project causing preemptive fear among drug companies

Michael Moore's upcoming 2007 documentary "Sicko" -- aimed at the $1.5 trillion healthcare and pharmaceutical industry -- has mobilized many companies within the medical industry to try to discredit Moore and the film, AdAge.com reports.

Moore, who directed such documentaries as "Roger and Me," "Bowling for Columbine" -- which won an Academy Award -- and "Fahrenheit 9/11," says on his website that he asked the public to send him letters about their healthcare system experiences, and received more than 19,000 of them.

"To read about the misery people are put through on a daily basis by our profit-based system was both moving and revolting," Moore writes. The filmmaker says he won't discuss the documentary with the public, but says, "'Sicko' is a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth."

AdAge.com claims that the pharmaceutical industry is attempting to discredit Moore's film by trying to spin the filmmaker as biased and one-sided. Ken Johnson, senior vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), says America needs a "thoughtful and well-researched" investigation into America's healthcare problems, and insists Moore's film won't provide that.

But consumer health advocate Mike Adams disagrees. "Big Pharma is the king of spin and propaganda," he says. "And drug companies will paint anything as 'biased' if it doesn't bow down to the lies, distortions and fraud being promoted by the industry. Big Pharma is not merely afraid of Michael Moore, they're afraid of anything resembling honest scrutiny or investigative journalism," he added.

Moore says that every family he talks to about healthcare nightmares suddenly receives free health care when pharmaceutical companies learn they've spoken to Moore. "There has been a 100 percent success rate of the people we're filming of getting whatever they need from HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, whatever," Moore says.