Jeremy Laurance draws attention to vast scale of drug company criminality

Jeremy Laurance draws attention in his detailed article in the Independent to the vast scale of drug company criminality and the failure of multibillion-dollar fines to curb the criminality. What is necessary is for the criminal bosses of these companies to appear in court to be tried and sentenced as individuals. Prison sentences for the people who initiate and sanction the bribery, corruption, fraud, cover-ups, lies, etc that result in great and avoidable suffering and premature deaths for innocent victims would be more likely to curb the criminal behaviour than corporate fines.

Clinical Trials of Drugs can cause serious injury and death without compensation to the human guinea pigs and their families

New drugs come at a price: a very great price of suffering to poor people you do not know or even know about. Read what Dr Mercola has to say about this in his new article today.

 

And read what Carolyn Thomas wrote in 2009 - that it is "No longer possible to believe much of clinical research published”

 

So all of that suffering is wasted anyway. - Read about it. Think about it. Do something about it.

Big Pharma has been given a license to defraud Texas patients

"The Texas Supreme Court has given Big Pharma a license to defraud Texas patients. In a unanimous ruling that ignores the decision of a local jury and overturns a lower appellate court, the Supreme Court ruled that big drug companies have no responsibility to directly warn patients about the dangers of powerful pharmaceuticals. With doctors and nursing homes already shielded from accountability, this decision completes the medical industry trifecta of immunity by adding drug makers to the list. The decision is not surprisingly being hailed by pharmaceutical conglomerates, medical industry lobbyists, and other special interests."
Read article at texaswatch.org (USA)

It's surprising how even your arms swell and can become painful when you are inappropriately or excessively dosed with Premarin or other oestrogen-containing drugs, including some birth control meds or HRT

It's surprising how even your arms swell and can become painful when you are inappropriately or excessively dosed with Premarin or other oestrogen-containing drugs, including some birth control meds or HRT.

Read of my own experience in this matter and of how I found a simple drug-free way to lessen the harm done. It's best to avoid pharmaceutical drugs if you possibly can. Just because they are prescribed for you, it doesn't mean that they are safe. Your doctor may not be well-informed about their side-effects, and the drug companies are notorious for down-playing harmful effects or keeping them secret for as long as they can. Big Pharma is/are frequently in the criminal courts for this and other misdemeanours. See this page also - especially if you did not know that oestrogen is a steroid.

For a new perspective on conflicts of interest with regard to the pharmaceutical industry and health campaigning charities

For a new perspective on conflicts of interest with regard to the pharmaceutical industry and health campaigning charities I invite you to put the name of one such charity and the words "pharmaceutical sponsors" into your favourite search engine's searchbox. - I typed

asthma.org.uk pharmaceutical sponsors

into my searchbox and I was led to a page about a publication by The Stationery Office, viz.

The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Fourth Report of Session 2004-05

By Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Health Committee, Health Committee Parliament Great Britain House of Commons.

Whoever the actual people were who wrote this publication, they were clearly aware that the drug industry's sponsorship of charities is not motivated by philanthropy, but by greed, in the hope and expectation of increasing the sales of their drugs, and thereby increasing their profits. You may draw your own conclusions from that, as I do mine. It leads me to conclude that the advice given on the websites and in the literature of some at least of the major health campaigning charities, such as AsthmaUK, DiabetesUK, British Heart Foundation and others, may not really be in the best interests of the patients/sufferers they ostensibly serve. I hold in mind that we are constantly assured that business companies must act in the interests of their share-holders. So if I wanted to help people suffering from asthma, I personally would advise them to cut down on salt and salty food as this would improve their health in many ways. It would reduce excess fluid retention and thereby reduce excess weight, one of the risk factors for asthma, It would reduce high blood pressure if they had high blood pressure. It would reduce breathing problems. - And very importantly, if they had gained a lot of weight from using prescribed steroids for their asthma symptoms, it would speedily reduce that weight gain and the other serious adverse effects of prescribed steroids.(See my webpage about prescribed steroids.) What I would definitely not do is donate to AsthmaUK... - I don't donate to drug company profits.

Come on now - you can't still believe, can you, that psychoactive drugs are safe?

Come on now - you can't still believe, can you, that psychoactive drugs are safe? or intended to help patients? or that the drug companies, and the many venal medics ensconced in their capacious cash-filled pockets, have the slightest concern for anyone's health and well-being but their own?

If you do still believe that the intentions of those with vested self-serving interests are honourable, then I suggest you read these recent articles: Alliance for Human Research Protection's The Real Biederman Scandal and Gaia Health's Big Pharma Spends $95 Thousand Per Doctor on Marketing Each Year and this kxon.com whistle-blower story.

Your health is your most precious possession and your brain is not infinitely elastic. - Say NO! to psychotropic drugs. And do what you can to protect others from them - especially children. There is growing and widespread unease among decent healthcare professionals at the harm being done by these dangerous drugs and the criminal drug companies - especially to children.

Big Pharma: the lies and corruption that promote sales of their Psychotropic Junk

Big Pharma in America: the lies and corruption that promote sales of their psychotropic junk and are damaging the health and happiness of ever-increasing numbers of Americans, most tragically children, in exchange for vast profits. Watch this video that was uploaded onto YouTube earlier this month.

Remember: the idea that depression and other mental health conditions are caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain is a myth invented by drug manufacturers in order to sell their vile products. Say NO! to their costly, chemical crap.

Dangerous practices and details of gross negligence at the Cidra pharmaceutical plant, run by one of GlaxoSmithKline's subsidiaries.

Dangerous practices and details of gross negligence at the Cidra pharmaceutical plant, run by one of GlaxoSmithKline's subsidiaries. - Read Dr Mercola's article about this. Do you agree with me that the top people of drug companies that are guilty of such negligence should personally have to be answerable to criminal charges in court and receive severe punishments, like prison sentences, in order to discourage repetition of the offences? - What if you or your loved ones are the next patients to suffer from Big Pharma's dangerous products?
If you agree with me on this, then draw these scandalous details to the notice of your friends, family and colleagues.

Here is an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm.

Here's an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm. It is written by a medical doctor, Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D., who is an academic and an ethicist. Commendably, he is not ambiguous in his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry and of their payments to greedy doctors who, for payment, compromise their integrity by lending their names and reputations to recommend drugs and medical devices unworthy of recommendation.

Pfizer and its calamitous drug trials in Nigeria.

Pfizer and its calamitous drug trials in Nigeria.- Justice delayed is justice denied. The Law should serve the afflicted, not the Pfizer pharmaceutical company that harmed them. Read this article and weep for the child victims of Big Pharma and its corrupt associates.

Nutrition Science or Nutrition Science Betrayed?

The War for Nutrition Science Integrity
"The American Society for Nutrition (ASN), the largest society for nutrition researchers in the US, openly receives support from pharmaceutical companies like Abbott Nutrition and Martek Biosciences, genetic engineering and pesticide giant Monsanto, food processor ConAgra, and junk food suppliers and producers Coca-Cola, Mars, Kraft, McDonald’s, General Mills, and Kellogg’s, not to mention the Sugar Association, Inc. (among many others). Think about that: an organization claiming “excellence in nutrition research and practice” receives major funding from companies making drugs, pesticides, and some of the most health-damaging foods on the planet."

We must all stand up and be counted in the battle against pharmaceutical junk, food junk and manipulated junk science. Good nutrition should be our civilisation’s foundation and a legacy to be bequeathed to future generations. Our health is being sold by scoundrels and bought by arch-criminals.
Read article on the website of the Alliance for Natural Health (USA)

Dr Mercola pillories drug industry's corporate criminality

Dr Mercola pillories Big Pharma's corporate criminality: read this shocking article.

CEOs should be prosecuted when pharmaceutical companies break the law

CEOs should be prosecuted when pharmaceutical companies break the law.

See this NewScientist article by Paul Thacker, an investigator at the Project On Government Oversight, a non-profit organisation exposing waste, fraud and abuse in federal government.

Female sexual dysfunction is an invention of the Drugs Industry

Female sexual dysfunction – which is claimed to affect up to two thirds of women – is a disorder invented by the pharmaceutical industry to build global markets for drugs to treat it, it is claimed.
Read article in The Independent (UK)
Comment: Research published in 2008 in the peer-reviewed journal Public Library of Science Medicine showed that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on marketing and promoting drugs than on research and development.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

I reckon The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have increased in number. I see them now as:

The Pharmaceutical Industry (Big Pharma)
The Food Industry and Agribusiness
Oil and Petrochemicals Industry
Corporate and International Lawyers
Arms Dealers
Corrupt Bankers
The Diet Industry

plus their stable-boys: - The EU, the Health Industry, corrupt politicians, the Press, the media...

Who would you add to that list?

America’s mental illness: it is the drugs that are the problem

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy - often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs -- to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies.
Read article by Gary G. Kohls, MD, at onlinejournal.com

European Medicines Agency working with patient groups bankrolled by drug industry

EU drugs agency working with patient groups bankrolled by Big Pharma
European patients' groups, set up to represent the interests of the subjects of medical procedures in their dealings with healthcare systems, insurance firms and drug companies are in many cases bankrolled by pharmaceutical firms, according to a report. Complicating the situation, many such groups are working with and on the board of the European Medicines Agency - the very EU agency charged with evaluation of medicines in the bloc. A fresh report from transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory accuses the EMA of mis-administrating conflict of interest guidelines allowing individuals and groups to say falsely that they are not sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry.
Read article at euobserver.com

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry: an unhealthy symbiosis

I am very impressed by the article I have just been reading online: Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry: who pays the piper? (Psychiatric Bulletin (2005) 29: 84-85 © 2005 The Royal College of Psychiatrists. As you can see, it was written some years ago, but its message is even more urgent today.

The three writers of the article are psychiatrists, concerned about the increasing grip the pharmaceutical industry has on the training of psychiatrists, on drug trials, on the inventing of new mental illnesses to be treated with psychotropic drugs, on the influencing of prescribing physicians to prescribe certain drugs, etc. It is a short and very clearly written article. I do urge you to read it.

My personal concern focuses mainly on the terrible suffering that psychotropic drugs can and do cause. I have written many times about the side-effect of morbid obesity (plus all its attendant illnesses and disabilities) resulting from many of these drugs.

Thousands upon thousands of children, mainly in America, are subjected to drug treatment for the flimsiest of reasons, and their young lives are blighted almost before they have begun. That is not even counting the effects on their brains themselves, and all the other systems of the body. The problem is compounded in America by the fact that so many of their legislators are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry and are lobbyists for it.

Children are not the only group who endure unnecessary illness, unhappiness and pain in order to swell the profits of Big Pharma. In my country, the UK, many elderly people in care homes are drugged with psychiatric coshes, bringing frailty, disability, indignities and hastened death, and the doctors who bring about this horrifying suffering incur neither censure nor sanction: EVEN THOUGH THE FACTS ARE WELL KNOWN BY THE GOVERNMENT.

We have had the thalidomide tragedies, the tranquilliser tragedies. We presently have the ever-increasing and reckless prescribing of anti-depressants, which complacent doctors delude themselves into believing 'save lives'. See Anti-depressants are no better than dummy pills and amitriptyline

The 'developed' world, that has nurtured the pharmaceutical industry until it has grown into a multinational malign entity 'too big to be allowed to fail', apparently, will come to rue its failure to nip corruption in the bud long ago.

Big Pharma's donations buy political influence and influence drug-prescribing habits in Australia.

Big Pharma spends millions every year buying influence in Canberra. Adele Ferguson and Eric Johnston investigate the ruthless tactics, the money and the spindoctors behind the scenes.

Read article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

Remember:

1) Pharmaceutical drugs have adverse side-effects that are frequently worse than the problem for which they are prescribed.

2) Good nutrition is the best medicine and has no adverse side-effects.

3) Cutting down on salt and salty food benefits your health in a multitude of ways.

Medical training in receipt of undesirable support from Big Pharma

Read article at pharmalot.com