- Business with disease: The scourge of prescription drugs (FCN, 01/26/2004)
- Activists charge pharmaceutical cartel with being a tool for genocide (FCN, 01/20/2004)
NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) – Perhaps the biggest lie that Americans have bought into is the possibility that there is a pill for every ill, charge critics of the legal drug manufacturing industry. Others say the problem is not just an American one, it is global.
“The people of the world are currently facing one of the largest challenges in human history. The right to health and life for billions of people is being threatened by the financial interests of the largest investment industry on earth–the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry,” Dr. Mathias Rath MD, a German physician and activist writes.
Jon Rappaport, a freelance investigative reporter for 20 years, and publisher of the site nomorefakenews.com, calls the pharmaceutical cartel a “great machine” that, in the name of profit, seeks to manage, rather than cure, disease. One method of management, according to Mr. Rappaport, is controlling the research for new drugs.
On January 16, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the North Chicago, Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories said their fourth-quarter profits rose 50 percent due to a 28 percent jump in United States prescription drug sales. The company reported net sales for the quarter at $2.75 billion. The AP said Abbott reported net sales in 2003 at $19.68 billion, up 17.3 percent from 2002.
An Abbott spokesperson said their new rheumatoid arthritis treatment, Humira, recorded $119 million in worldwide sales in the fourth quarter, giving just one reason for the company’s profit margin. Industry analysts say there is a large demand for arthritis products by the public.
Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, in a January 14 article in the London-based Guardian newspaper, wrote that drug companies spend millions to bring a new drug to the market. He added that the drug companies also spend “tens of millions of pounds” to do the clinical trials that are necessary for both registry of a drug and marketing.
Mr. Smith said that Canadian laboratories looked at 69 trials of anti-arthritis drugs, in 1994, that were funded by drug companies. “Understandably, companies would prefer results for the trials that are favorable; and despite the uncertainties of science and medicine, they rarely get an unfavorable results from the trials,” Mr. Smith writes. “How do they manage it?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Smith is stating the obvious, that the overwhelming majority of drug studies done by pharmaceutical companies are positive–so positive, they must be rigged,” argues Mr. Rappaport. “Published drug studies, when done by drug manufacturers, should not be allowed; and it’s the studies which most often are submitted to licensing agencies such as the Federal Drug Administration, which then certifies the product as safe and effective.”
National Minister of Health for the Nation of Islam, Dr. Alim Muhammad, explained, “Not only is this ‘drug cartel’ able to control consumer markets, they also control political leadership through campaign contributions; and also control the so-called regulatory agencies of government.”
Tight control of government by the drug cartel is its ability to have legislation drafted and passed that gives a government mandate for pharmaceutical products, he continued.
“Products are on the market that may be unsafe and ineffective, due to inadequate testing or regulation,” Dr. Muhammad said, adding, “Remember, the FDA standard for approval is only 30 percent effectiveness.”
Under such circumstances, what confidence would there be that the government “of, by, and for the people” would do its job of protecting citizens against the “profits at any cost cartel?” he asked.
“I was told that there was no cure for Arthritis,” a woman wrote to Cure Your Arthritis.com on January 19, 2004. She said for 43 years she had been told by at least “13 Arthritis Specialists”–all “recommended by the Arthritis Foundation”–to take these drugs for the pain and go home and live with it. “Forty-three years of thousands of dollars and doctor’s bills for medication that did not work,” the unidentified woman said.
The above-mentioned woman is still living; some observers might say she is one of the lucky ones, because there are reports of people dying from over-medication.
“It is unbelievable what medications are doing to people,” said Patricia Dallas, a funeral director and mortician at Brooklyn, New York’s Woodward Funeral Home. “We recently had the body of a young man who died from diabetes, but his body was grossly damaged from the medication he had been taking,” she told The Final Call.
She said that such cases were not an aberration. “I believe that many people may very well be sick, but it is the medications that are killing them,” Ms. Dallas stressed.
“The marketplace of this industry is from disease; and its future growth is dependent on the further expansion of the disease market–in other words, your continued ill health,” warns Dr. Rath.
