page, which is devoted to an explanation of the many and multi-faceted ongoing scams of the drug industry and how it relates to you.

from: http://www.healthfactor.info/001969.html

Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Commentary - author: Mike Adams

Vioxx only the beginning; antidepressants and statin drugs are medication timebombs

There's a much bigger story than you might think about the recent hoo-ha concerning Vioxx being pulled from the market. It's not just about Vioxx or Merck, the drug's manufacturer. Virtually all prescription drugs that are heavily marketed by pharmaceutical companies today are harmful to human physiology. Every drug has unintended side effects, and almost no drugs undergo thorough testing. This is one of the great misunderstood points about modern medicine -- people think that the FDA approves drugs only after they have been adequately tested on large numbers of people for several years. They think that drugs must be "proven" safe before the FDA will approve them. But this is not the case at all; in fact, the FDA is increasingly approving drugs after very short trials. I've seen drugs approved after 12 weeks of testing on a couple hundred people. That's hardly the threshold of credibility that should be required of prescription drugs before they are unleashed on the public and marketed to tens of millions of people along with instructions that tell people to be taking these for life.

That's one of the big scams in the pharmaceutical industry -- these drugs are tested on a few hundred people (or sometimes only a few dozen people) for very short durations, such as a couple of months or weeks, and then they are approved by the FDA on fast track programs and heavily marketed to the general public with instructions that they should be used for a lifetime. Vioxx, it turns out, was a sleeping giant of a problem. It was a hidden landmine that people were taking on a daily basis, thinking it was doing them some good. But the real risk to Vioxx only became apparent after people were taking it for a period of years.

Well, the question remains -- what other prescription drugs have the same problems that are only going to become apparent years later? I can give you the answer to two of those right now, and that is antidepressant drugs and statin drugs. On the antidepressant drugs front, the evidence is now starting to emerge. We're finding that drug companies distorted clinical trials, withheld information from the FDA, and then suppressed negative studies that would have shown quite clearly the correlation between antidepressants and violent behavior / suicides.
In contrast, there is very little talk about statin drugs and the hidden dangers they pose to human health. We have tens of millions of people now either taking statin drugs or considering taking them in order to lower their LDL cholesterol, based on advice from their doctors. For their part, doctors and physicians are heavily hyping up statin drugs and claiming that nearly everyone should be taking these for life because "they're so good for you." There's even been talk of dripping statin drugs into the water supply -- an idea that is so outlandish as to be truly bizarre, even for Big Pharma.
People who take statin drugs today are going to learn something quite interesting five or ten years from now. What they're going to learn is what people who have been taking Vioxx are learning today, which is that these drugs are not adequately tested, that there are severe side effects, and that a person's total health is actually reduced when they take prescription drugs.
Let's face it -- drug companies sell the promise of health, longevity, and cures for diseases. They use imagery that makes you think you might be healthy by taking their drugs. They spend billions of dollars on promotion to convince people that their lives will be happier and healthier if they would only purchase these pills and take them on a regular basis. They promise all of this, but they deliver none of it. In contrast, what they actually deliver is liver toxicity, brain confusion, birth defects, imbalanced physiology, and a chain reaction of biological side effects that are only now beginning to surface in the scientific community.
Patent medicines are toxic chemicals that are not suitable for human consumption. And the more heavily marketed a prescription drug is, the worse it ends up being for you.

What we need to do as a society is learn from these mistakes. It's time to take a much closer look at the highly corrupt relationship between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies. It's time to re-examine the drug approval process and demand a much higher standard of safety. It's time to hold pharmaceutical companies financially accountable for the death and the harm they cause to tens of millions of customers who consume their products and who suffer the health consequences as a result.
It's time to stop pushing drugs onto consumers as something they should be taking for a lifetime, and start reverting back to the only justifiable role of prescription drugs that a society should allow: the temporary, emergency use of them to balance acute metabolic or biological disorders to give the patient enough time to make lifestyle changes that could bring their health back into balance. And finally, it's also time to ban all direct-to-consumer advertising by pharmaceutical companies. These ads, which are plastered across television stations, billboards, and seem to dominate magazines and newspapers these days, do nothing but unduly influence customers, causing them to request overpriced, brand name prescription drugs from their doctors, even when they have no clue whatsoever what the drugs do for them. Direct-to-consumer advertising is partly responsible for this current Vioxx mess, and it is something that should be outlawed in our nation in order to protect the health of the public.
Let's get serious about this. Patients don't have the training to determine whether they should be taking certain prescription drugs -- this is a decision that doctors should be making. So why are pharmaceutical companies allowed to advertise directly to the general public in the first place? The kind of system we should have in place is a system where all drug trial results are publicly posted in an open-source database, and then where doctors can have free and open access to that database to decide on their own what drugs might be useful in certain limited situations. Virtually all pharmaceutical marketing, advertising, and public relations should be outlawed, including the pharmaceutical influence in medical schools and drug rep visits to doctor's offices.
Until we are willing to step up and put a limit on the influence and reach of the pharmaceutical industry, we as a nation are going to continue to collide with results like we're seeing here with Vioxx. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The increase in heart attack and strokes from taking Vioxx was rather small, but there are no doubt other prescription drugs that have far more dangerous side effects, and I believe that includes statin drugs which will someday be the source of a major class-action lawsuit against Big Pharma.
As an end user, what can you do to protect yourself from the hidden, unknown side effects of prescription drugs? The answer is simple: don't work with any doctor who uses drugs as a first resort. Find yourself a naturopathic physician, and do everything you can in terms of changing your lifestyle, engaging in physical exercise, getting natural sunshine, and pursuing a highly nutritious diet in order to enhance your health and prevent disease so that you don't need prescription drugs in the first place.
Remember, the human body has a blueprint for health. All you need to do is provide it with the building blocks it needs and engage in the kinds of activity for which it was designed. Your body can achieve health on its own, without chemical additives in the form of prescription drugs. In fact, the minute you start taking a prescription drug, your health begins to decline, and it is very difficult to reverse.
By the way, for those suffering from arthritis and inflammation, here are two simple things you can do to reduce that inflammation. Number one, drink lots of water, because often inflammation is a result of a state of chronic dehydration. And number two, avoid drinking cow's milk, because dairy products actually promote stagnation -- and to some degree, various allergic reactions throughout the body which may be misdiagnosed as arthritis.
Also, be sure to get plenty of vitamin D, and the best way to do that is to get natural sunlight on your skin on a regular basis. Dr. Colick, author of the UV Advantage, recommends that people with fair skin get 5-10 minutes a day, 3 days a week in order to get adequate vitamin D into their diet. As he explains it, many people who suffer from aches and arthritis are actually suffering from nothing more complicated than a chronic vitamin D deficiency, because they aren't getting sunlight and they aren't getting vitamin D in their diet.
So, if you do these three things -- avoiding cow's milk and dairy products, drinking lots of water each day, and getting vitamin D into your diet through exposure to natural sunlight or by taking cod liver oil as a nutritional supplement -- you will find that most of your aches and pains are fading away in the first place.
Bottom line is, people don't need Vioxx. What they need is an education about what really works, not only to reverse the symptoms of arthritis, but to engage in a healthy lifestyle that prevents chronic disease in the long run.

EDITORIAL COMMENT: Obviously, the solution to the Big Pharma Holocaust is to give them even more taxpayer money !

from: http://www.newstarget.com/004583.html

Monday, February 14, 2005 Commentary - author: Mike Adams

Problems with Vioxx prompt Bush's call for beefed-up FDA drug-monitoring programs

In his tightly packed federal budget proposal that calls for deep cuts to many government programs, President Bush asks for a 24 percent funding increase for drug monitoring. Bush cites last year's problems with Vioxx as the main sign the Food and Drug Administration needs more money. FDA officials are still dealing with the consequences of originally approving the arthritis painkiller that was eventually pulled from the market after links to heart attacks were discovered. If you find this article interesting, be sure to also read 'Merck caught in scandal to bury Vioxx heart attack risks, intimidate scientists and keep pushing dangerous drugs; Vioxx lawsuits now forming.'
News summary:
Source: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=7560923

The Bush administration proposed on Monday a 24 percent increase in funding for the Food and Drug Administration office that monitors the safety of drugs after they hit the market.
The proposal follows last year's withdrawal of a well-known painkiller and charges that the FDA pays too little attention to serious side effects that emerge after drugs win approval.
The additional $6.5 million would be used in part to hire 25 more employees for the Office of Drug Safety, Kathy Heuer, the FDA's chief financial officer, said in an interview.
About $1.5 million of the new money would come from congressionally mandated industry user fees, which pharmaceutical companies pay in exchange for faster reviews of their products.
This money would be used to hire five of the new reviewers, Heuer said.
The increased funding was part of President Bush's proposed budget for fiscal 2006, which starts Oct. 1.
The drug safety office came under scrutiny last year when a veteran scientist said his FDA supervisors ignored or downplayed his warnings about risks of Merck & Co. Inc.'s arthritis drug Vioxx.
Charles Grassley, who held a pivotal hearing in November over Vioxx's withdrawal, said he would still push for greater independence for the safety office.
"In addition to more resources, I want to make sure the drug safety office gains independence from the office of new drugs," said Grassley, an Iowa Republican.
Bush budget papers said the added money for the safety office would also fund access to a range of databases to help scientists spot potential problems with prescription drugs.
Overall, the FDA budget would increase by $81 million to $1.9 billion in fiscal 2006 under Bush's plan.

Drug companies allegedly defraud state Medicaid programs with 54,000% markups

Where do you find a two-dollar bottle of sodium chloride selling for $928.51? In Big Pharma, of course, where 79 drug companies are now being accused of defrauding state Medicaid programs by artificially inflating the prices of drugs. According to the Department of Justice, the actual wholesale price of many drugs and medical supplies is a mere fraction of what is claimed by the drug companies. The difference -- the "price spread" -- is pure profit for drug companies who are profiting handsomely at the expense of taxpayers.

The scam is being described by the Alabama Attorney General as a "systematic" effort by pharmaceutical companies to defraud states of billions of dollars. It's yet another example of the widespread lack of ethics in the pharmaceutical industry, where seemingly any strategy that makes money is supported: scientific fraud, Medicaid fraud, censorship, bribery, intimidation... and that's just what we've seen in the national headlines in the last month!

You see, the drug racket isn't just about dangerous drugs like Vioxx being peddled to tens of millions of Americans, it's also about financial fraud designed to extract even more money from taxpayers. Like parasites that don't know when to stop, drug companies seemed determined to drain the economic life away from the country in any way possible.

What we're seeing today is unrestrained capitalism at its worst. The so-called "free market" system of organized medicine is really only free and open to those organizations that control the media propaganda, FDA decision makers, medical journal content and med school agendas. And, of course, those are the organizations with the big bucks. What we're increasingly learning is that they got the big bucks by defrauding customers and hyping drugs with fatal side effects that they knew were dangerous long before now. In other words, it's blood money. And you can go right down the line and name all the drugs that are killing people (or seriously harming them) right now: COX-2 inhibitors, antidepressants, statin drugs, NSAIDs, and many more.

Consider where we are today with organized medicine:

50% of all personal bankruptcies in America are due to medical bills.
Vioxx alone is now reportedly responsible for killing more Americans (via heart attacks) than all American fatalities in the Vietnam War. (Source: The Lancet)
2/3rds of the FDA's own drug safety scientists don't believe the agency can protect the American public from dangerous drugs. (Source: FOIA of HHS / FDA internal survey.)
Scientific censorship, intimidation, distortion of clinical trials, and the bribing of doctors is now the norm. (Source: Dr. David Graham, senior drug safety scientist, the FDA.)
40% of all Americans are now on prescription drugs of some kind and yet the national health continues to decline.

There's no doubt that the drug companies are after one thing only: profit. And they seem to be willing to trade anything for it: ethics, safety, honesty, humanity, compassion... you name it. As long as there's money to be made, they're the first in line, regardless of the tactics. This behavior even makes Enron look good. After all, Enron was a fiasco, but at least in the end it was only money, not lives at stake. But with Big Pharma, it's both.

Let's take a closer look at some of the actual figures that reveal just how egregious the drug companies have been in their overcharging of prescription drugs: (this is from the Office of Alabama Attorney General)

Where will all this go? Stay tuned to this site. We'll cover the lawsuit as it progresses and find out whether the drug companies will ever have to face the music on this one. Hopefully, this will have some real bite and not end up being settled behind closed doors with little more than a slap on the wrist.

It is the ongoing tolerance of this sort of behavior by drug companies that has allowed it to continue so far. And it will only be public outrage and legal action that will force changes to occur.

In the mean time, I have some salt... er, I mean sodium chloride on sale for just 1/10th the price being charged by one of the drug companies being sued here. Yep: just $90 per bottle. What a steal! Send me $900 and I'll send you ten bottles of salt!

And if you think that's stupid, just imagine: your state has been sending drug companies $900 checks for one bottle of what is essentially salt water. Those are your state tax dollars at work. Aren't you impressed by the financial efficiencies of state government? No wonder the states are suing over it.

Related articles:

from: http://www.newstarget.com/001449.html

Tuesday, February 08, 2005 Commentary Author Mike Adams

Florida Attorney General sues six pharmaceutical companies for price fixing and possibly defrauding Medicaid

Demonstrating yet again that pharmaceutical companies will do anything to make a buck, six such companies are under fire by the Florida Attorney General who has issued civil subpoenas concerning potential overcharges to Medicaid in the amount of $100 million. Apparently, the pharmaceutical companies involved in this scam inflated the "wholesale" prices charged to Medicaid, thereby pocketing additional profits at the expense of taxpayers.

That pharmaceutical companies would overcharge the government for prescription drugs should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the dealings of the industry. Companies routinely mark up prescription drugs as much as 500,000% over the cost of the raw ingredients, and they engage in monopolistic, mob-like behaviors to block competing, lower cost drugs from Canada and other countries.

In the mean time, the pharmaceutical industry has long since demonstrated its own alarming lack of ethics by, for example, hiding the results of negative drug trials, distorting other trials to show false benefits of drugs, and outright bribing physicians with so-called "consulting fees" if they'll write more prescriptions for their drugs.

I've frequently called for criminal investigations of pharmaceutical companies and even the FDA. This action by the Florida Attorney General is a step in the right direction, but it barely scratches the surface of the extremely profitable criminal operation known as Big Pharma.

Overview:

Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist has issued civil subpoenas to six pharmaceutical manufacturers regarding their wholesale pricing practices.
The investigation focuses on estimated overcharges to the Medicaid program of in excess of $100 million.
"We need to get to the bottom of pharmaceutical pricing practices," said Crist.
"If a violation has occurred, we will pursue and recoup these funds, which will help citizens and the overall state budget."
The subpoenas request materials that will assist in the determination of liability under the Florida False Claims Act.
The materials are to be provided to the Attorney General's Office by August 16, 2004.
The manufacturers are: Mylan, Geneva, Ivax, PurPac, Teva and Watson.
The time frame of the questioned conduct is 1994 to the present.
Florida's Medicaid program reimburses pharmaceutical providers at wholesale prices reported by manufacturers.
The subpoenas will help determine whether the reported wholesale prices were inflated beyond the actual wholesale price, resulting in overpayments.

Source: http://www.news-medical.net/?id=3432

Maker of Claritin Drug To Plead Guilty To Federal Criminal Anti-Kickback Charges, Pay Fine of $52 Million, Also Facing $282 Million In Civil Liabilities

In yet another example of a pharmaceutical company found guilty of criminal charges in terms of price-fixing, the drug company Schering-Plough has agreed to plead guilty to federal anti-kickback charges. The company, which makes the popular Claritin drug, had failed to provide the best price to state Medicaid programs for its Claritin drug, and as a result, was overcharging states to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia were involved in this agreement, which requires Schering-Plough to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. The drug company's sales practices will also be under "strict scrutiny" for five years, according to federal government officials.

This is yet another example of a drug company exploiting the system for maximum profit. It's almost a wonder that they were even caught, given that this kind of practice is widespread in the pharmaceutical industry. Personally, I'm wondering who's going to be scrutinizing Schering-Plough for the next five years -- will it be the FDA, and if so, what motivation does the FDA have to make sure Schering-Plough follows the rules from here forward? I wouldn't be surprised if employees of the FDA were shareholders in this company or had received monies or payments in the past for being consultants or employees of this company.

The bottom line is that when it comes to prescription drug companies and the pharmaceutical industry, the American taxpayers are consistently getting screwed by the system. They're being ripped off on a daily basis from over-priced prescription drugs that can be purchased for far less from Canada, Mexico, and European countries. Every once in a while, one of these drug companies gets caught and has to pay back a portion of the profits that it stole from the American public, but by and large, most of these pharmaceutical companies consider this kind of practice to be business as usual. Very few are actually caught for these sort of underhanded deals, and even when they are caught, they are typically only required to pay back fines that represent a fraction of the profits they generated from such activities.

Once again, contrast this with the treatment given to makers of nutritional supplements when they're targeted by the FDA. For example, one company called Lane Labs was targeted by the FDA because it was selling a nutritional supplement that actually promised to cure cancer. It contained powerful immune boosting extracts of rice bran and medicinal mushrooms, and in fact, I believe the product was an effective cure for many cancers. The product was named MGN-3.

When the FDA targeted this company, they not only put them out of business, they made sure they couldn't sell MGN-3 in the United States and they demanded that the company reimburse all customers who had purchased MGN-3 over the last six years, thereby draining Lane Labs of operating cash, and practically ensuring it would go broke.

Meanwhile, when Schering-Plough is caught and pleads guilty to federal charges of ripping off taxpayers, the company is merely fined a fraction of the total revenues it generated from its operations. If this punishment had been consistent with the degree of punishment that is usually dealt out to nutritional supplement companies, Schering-Plough would have been required to actually refund the full purchase price of Claritin to all wholesale customers who had purchased the drug over the last six years. That would have amounted to a far greater dollar amount.

As you can see, there remains a great disparity in the way companies are treated by the U.S. legal system and the Food and Drug Administration, and the treatment they receive depends entirely on whether they are pushing prescription drugs vs. nutritional supplements. When a company like Lane Labs actually tells the truth about a product that helps cure cancer, it is put out of business by the FDA -- it is destroyed. But when a company like Schering-Plough admits to criminal charges involving kickbacks of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is allowed to remain in business to keep on selling its popular drug, and to make good by merely paying a fraction of the total revenues in terms of fines.

And that, folks is just one way in which the FDA makes sure that the pharmaceutical companies continue to thrive while alternative medicine, complementary medicine, nutritional supplements and other natural healing modalities remain suppressed.

Overview:

Wisconsin will recover $1.75 million from drug-maker Schering-Plough Corp. as part of a national Medicaid pricing dispute, Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager said Monday.
Nationwide, Schering-Plough will pay $140.7 million to state Medicaid programs for damages and penalties from Schering-Plough's underpayment of Medicaid drug rebates on its widely used antihistamine, Claritin.
The agreement involves 49 states and the District of Columbia.
The Federal Medicaid Drug Rebate statute requires pharmaceutical companies to provide Medicaid programs with the "best price" available, Lautenschlager said in a statement.
In the case, Schering-Plough provided better discounts for Claritin to two health maintenance organizations than it gave to state Medicaid programs, according to the U.S. attorney general's office in Philadelphia, which negotiated the settlement.
"The result was that states received millions less in rebates from Schering" than they should have under federal rules, Lautenschlager said.
Under the agreement, Schering-Plough will plead guilty to federal criminal anti-kickback charges and pay a fine of $52.5 million.
Schering-Plough also entered into a civil false claims settlement in federal court in which the drug-maker will pay $282.3 million in civil liabilities, with $140.7 million of that going to the states.
Schering-Plough's pricing and sales practices will be under "strict scrutiny" for five years, according to federal government officials.
From the Aug. 3, 2004, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Get the Journal Sentinel delivered to your home.

Source: http://www.jsonline.com/bym/news/aug04/248255.asp

from: http://www.reformthefda.org/003204.html

Tuesday, February 08, 2005 Commentary - Author Mike Adams

Direct-to-consumer advertising must be banned as part of FDA reform

This is part two of an article on FDA reform.

The next thing that should be done in reforming the FDA is to reverse some of the dangerous and poorly made decisions put in place by the FDA over the last few years. The most obvious of these is the legalization of direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies. This decision was made in 1997 and it allowed drug companies to place ads on television, in magazines, newspapers, billboards and other media with the purported goal of "educating" consumers about prescription drugs. And yet the very premise is laughable. No reasonable person could possibly believe that drug companies should advertising prescription drugs to patients who don't have medical qualifications to even understand if they should use those drugs in the first place. The idea of pushing these drugs to patients so that they go to their doctors and request them by name is medically reckless. It has no medical basis whatsoever. It is clearly just a ploy that was approved by the FDA to financially benefit the drug companies at the expense of public health.

It is this direct-to-consumer advertising, in fact, that is largely responsible for the over-medication of people with dangerous drugs such as Vioxx. This direct-to-consumer advertising continues today, and it is adding to the problem by creating an over-medicated nation where patients think they have to make a list of advertised drugs, then go to their doctor and request them by name. Many times, patients don't even have any idea what these drugs do -- they just see these images of happy, healthy people on television who have been hired to play roles in these drug advertisements, and the patients of course think they want to feel that way too, so they go to their doctor and request these drugs.

The whole system is absurd. First of all, people who take prescription drugs aren't healthier in the long run anyway. The more drugs you take, the worse you get, because every drug has unsafe side effects as recently admitted by the FDA. Every drug you take makes you less healthy in the long run. There is no prescription drug that is as good for you as changing your lifestyle, engaging in physical exercise, and making healthier food choices to prevent chronic disease. Prescription drugs have absolutely no place as lifelong chemicals to be consumed by human beings. At best, they should only be used for short term acute disorders as stop-gap measures to help people survive while they make lifestyle changes that eliminate the underlying cause of their health problems in the first place.

The next thing that should be addressed at the FDA is the dissolution of the financial arrangements between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. Today, pharmaceutical companies actually pay the FDA to review their drugs. This turns drug companies into customers, and the more customers the FDA pleases, the more money the agency earns, meaning it can grow its own staff and expand its power base. So of course it's going to be in the long term interests of key FDA decision makers to please its customers. Those customers are the drug companies.

This financial relationship must end. The FDA should be funded solely by taxpayer dollars, not by drug companies themselves. This would allow the FDA the neutrality and the independent viewpoint from which it could make an honest safety assessment of prescription drugs.

One more thing that needs to be addressed is the drug side effects reporting mechanism, because today there is absolutely no requirement whatsoever for doctors to report toxic side effects from prescription drugs to the FDA. In fact, there is not even a requirement for drug companies to report their information to the FDA when they learn about toxic side effects in drugs. The reporting system is 100% voluntary. And that means it's nearly a miracle when any drug accumulates enough negative information to actually be banned by the FDA, because enough people have to volunteer that information, and it has to accumulate over time to the point where the FDA can no longer ignore it. This is a poor system for protecting the public health. The reporting of side effects from prescription drugs should be mandatory. This is common sense, and drug companies should be held criminally responsible if they fail to reveal evidence they have about the negative effects of prescription drugs.

So in effect, to look at this whole situation, we have one big problem, and that's the FDA as it exists today. It is broken. It is discredited. It is operated by ethically disadvantaged individuals who deserve to be prosecuted for not just endangering, but actually killing literally hundreds of thousands of American citizens. That is not an exaggeration of the statistics. But even if we create an alternative to the FDA, we still have three big problems that need to be addressed right away.

The first is direct-to-consumer advertising. The second is the funding of the FDA. And the third is the drug side effects reporting system. These three fundamental problems need to be addressed immediately if we are to live in a nation where we aren't killing our citizens with our own products that are actually safety approved by the government itself.

To put all this into perspective, keep in mind that prescription drugs have killed far more Americans, in fact thousands of times more Americans, than all terrorists combined. If you think terrorists have committed crimes against the American people, then what do you think about the pharmaceutical industry that kills 100,000 people per year according to the journal of the American Medical Association, or as many as 750,000 people per year if you agree with the "Death By Medicine" numbers that also include medical mistakes? And now with the knowledge that many of these deaths could have been prevented had the people at the FDA been doing their jobs, or had the people at drug companies been practicing even basic human ethics, then is this not a case of crimes against humanity?

Is this not a crime against the American people that should be immediately investigated and rectified? Frankly, I've seen far more law enforcement efforts exerted towards catching one murderer who has killed one person, and yet here we have an entire agency, a group of powerful people, whose negligent actions have killed hundreds of thousands of people, and there has yet to be serious law enforcement action initiated against them. Just because these people are government employees should not immunize them from criminal prosecution. In fact, I would say that as government employees, they should be held to a higher standard of ethics and protecting the sanctity of human life, because they hold substantial power over that life.

And it is precisely this power that they have abused over a period of many years in order to achieve their own selfish aims of power, control and financial profit.

If all the people who had been killed by prescription drugs were able to rise up from their graves and march on Washington right now, we would see a revolution in medicine overnight. But unfortunately, they lie in their graves unable to speak the truth about what really needs to be done, and thus it is up to us, the survivors of this chemical nightmare, to take responsibility for this situation and make sure that we and our children are no longer harmed by this reckless "Fraud and Drug Administration" that has lost sight of its mission and any sense of value for human life.

from: http://www.reformthefda.org/002082.html

Tuesday, February 08, 2005 Commentary - Author Mike Adams

The FDA finally admits antidepressant drugs cause suicidal tendencies in children

The FDA has now finally admitted that children who use antidepressant drugs are 180 percent more likely to have suicidal tendencies than children taking placebos. This is after the agency stalled for months by requesting an independent investigation of the research data, during which antidepressant drugs continued to be prescribed in huge numbers to children around the country and around the world -- all at great profit to pharmaceutical companies.

Apparently, this took so long because the FDA wasn�t sure if the children were committing suicide from taking prescription drugs or from having to talk to FDA investigators. Apparently, children who are treated as guinea pigs by U.S. drug companies and drug regulators tend to think far more violent thoughts. I�m not sure why that is, but it could be that the drugs are interfering with their Ritalin.

The FDA has been accused of delaying this obvious decision on announcing the dangers of antidepressant drugs. In its defense, the FDA says it wasn�t an intentional delay. The agency was just too busy rubber-stamping the approval of other drugs by pharmaceutical companies. The agency also explained it is trying to move more quickly on the approval of drugs so that children who show suicidal tendencies can be put on a third drug: anti-suicide drugs that alter their brain chemistry and counteract the negative side effects of antidepressant drugs.

So at first the kid is hyper and you put him on Ritalin. Then, he feels down all the time and gets depressed, so you put him on antidepressants. When he attempts to commit suicide, you put him on anti-suicide drugs and end up writing three checks to your local pharmacy instead of one. That�s good business, according to the FDA, because now the children are being taken care of by the very best high-tech medicine available anywhere in the world.

Are there really depressed, bummed out kids running around our country who need prescription drugs? Buy those kids an X-Box and hook them up to some interactive video games. Get them some cool science projects or some construction kits where they can build their own robots. It seems to me that these drugs for children are really marketed and purchased for the benefit of the parents who are probably more drugged out than the children ever deserved to be in the first place.

By the way, ever wonder what�s stupid about all of this? Even though the FDA finally admits that these drugs cause children to have suicidal tendencies, the drug remains perfectly legal and can be prescribed to children by physicians right now without any repercussions from the FDA.

Overview:

A Food and Drug Administration reexamination of data linking the pediatric use of some antidepressants to increased suicidal tendencies has once again found a connection, and the agency is actively considering new warnings to highlight the risk.
Based on that new analysis of data from trials of antidepressant drugs, Mosholder found a similarly significant correlation -- that children using the drugs were 1.8 times as likely to have suicidal tendencies as depressed children who took placebos.
Yesterday's release by the FDA of Mosholder's second report, along with numerous other papers on the subject, represented a dramatic change by the agency.
"Doctor Mosholder's initial findings have been confirmed and reconfirmed," Grassley said yesterday in a statement.
In December, British regulators warned doctors and patients against the use of antidepressants other than Prozac for children, saying that the risks outweighed the benefits.
The FDA has studied similar information and concluded, as an agency, that there still is not clear evidence that the antidepressants are harmful to children.
Although only Prozac has been approved by the FDA for use by children, doctors are believed to be prescribing similar medications to increasing numbers of youngsters.
In March, the FDA told physicians to closely monitor patients of all ages for warning signs of suicide when they start taking antidepressants or when they change dosages.
Antidepressants are known to cause agitation, anxiety and hostility in a small number of patients, and some whose severe depression has caused them to be lethargic might become suicidal as the drugs cause the depression to lift.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20385-2004Aug20.html

May my beloved partner ROMI rest in peace - no matter wherever her bits and pieces/frozen carcass may be held hostage.