The Bitterest Pill

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The Bitterest Pill

 

the unhealthy dominance of the pharmaceutical industry

 

another great story

from

 

www.whatareweswallowing.com

 

 

 

“Science and research must be studied in the context of all the interested

parties involved. The questions centre on determining the relative weight of the

various allies in the ‘fact-creating’ process - e.g. funding bodies, businesses,

departments of state, professions and other scientists. In analysing scientific

debates, one should always ask what social, institutional and political

interests lie behind often apparently ‘neutral’ and ‘technical’ knowledge

claims.” 1

 

 

 

…a benchmark surely for those wishing to research conventional science and

medicine. Personally speaking, I soon learnt that all drug companies are

interested in three things only: perpetuating their own ‘fact-creating’ process

on the cause and cure of disease: perpetuating those ‘Epidemic! Must Medicate!

Must Vaccinate!’ headlines, which in turn, perpetuate pharmaceutical profits as

we obediently line up to receive the latest ‘preventative’ or ‘cure’.

 

What these corporations never tell us though is that good health is dependent

upon sound nutrition, sound environment, minimal toxic medical intervention and

common sense.

 

So what is the relative weight of the interested parties involved in

conventional health today?

 

Taking UK multi-national Glaxo SmithKline as an example, GSK sells myriad drugs

for myriad conditions, ranging from cancer, diabetes and arthritis through to

nicotine and alcohol cravings and various respiratory disorders. Whilst GSK

states that its global mission is to improve the quality of human life,

externally, its board members hold senior positions with corporations that do

not have mankind’s best interests at heart, including directorships of alcohol,

tobacco and chemical-pollutant conglomerates and various companies promoting

high sugar and fat diets.

 

GSK chairman Richard Sykes is a director of Rio Tinto, a mining company with an

appalling human rights record, continually exposing its workers to toxic fumes,

lead, arsenic and radioactive materials, leading to cancers and other serious

illness. 2

 

Deputy chairman Roger Hurn, along with fellow directors Ian Prosser and John

Young hold key positions at chief pollutants ICI, BP-Amoco and Chevron

respectively.

 

GSK director Donald McHenry resides on the board at Coca-Cola which is currently

facing a lawsuit over allegedly triggering type-2 diabetes and GSK colleague

Paul Allaire holds a senior position at ‘artery sludge’ food giant Sara Lee –

which features in Multi-national Monitor’s worst 10 corporations of 2001.

 

This unflattering accolade was secured thanks to a Sara Lee management team that

wilfully ignored listeria contamination at its Michigan meat-processing plant

and allowed the continued production of thousands of poisonous hot dogs,

culminating in at least twenty one deaths and one hundred serious injuries. At

the hearing, an expert defence team in the shape of Michigan law firm Jenner and

Block (would you believe!) brought new meaning to the terms ‘misdemeanour’ and

‘technicality’ and successfully averted all felony charges against Sara Lee,

thus ensuring the continuation of its lucrative hot dog contract with the US

Dept of Defence. And for this multiple loss of life, Sara Lee was fined only

$200,000. 3

 

Recently retired from the GSK board is Derek Bonham, a director at Imperial

Tobacco. GSK made over £470M in 2001 from various ‘stop smoking’ aids including

Zyban now featuring on the BBC News website as being implicated in 6,975 adverse

reactions and 57 UK user deaths. 4 And true to form, campaigners and legal

representatives concerned about the 57 deaths and adverse reactions have not

been contacted to give evidence in the NICE (National Institute for Clinical

Excellence) hearing on the efficacy of Zyban. (Mail on Sunday, 3.3.2002)

 

GSK board member Christopher Hogg is a director at alcohol giant Allied Domecq,

while the already-mentioned Ian Prosser is chairman of Bass Breweries. What part

will these two gents play in the promotion of Zofran, GSK’s wonder drug to beat

alcoholism? 5

 

GSK is also blessed with the expertise of arms dealer Dr Jean Pierre Garnier,

who sits on the board of Black Hawk helicopter manufacturer United Technologies.

6

 

And oh yes, former executive director at GSK, Jeremy Strachan, has recently been

appointed Secretary of the British Medical Association. 7

 

*******

 

A bleak insight indeed into the cosy, anti-health, manufacturers’ end of the

drug industry. But what about supply end? Who funds the medical colleges for

instance?

 

In almost all instances, the major medical universities are funded directly from

pharmaceutical coffers This understandably brings a certain pressure upon the

syllabus: ie., much tutoring on profitable pharmaceutical solutions to illness

and disease, little tutoring on the unprofitable relationship between nutrition

and good health and even less on disease prevention and its true cure. After

all, how would share-holders respond to any downturn in drug sales?

 

Having spent many years working in the British Foreign Office, thriller writer

John Le Carre knows the mechanics of big business. His most recent book The

Constant Gardener, focuses on the corrupt nature of the pharmaceutical industry.

In an interview on the subject, Le Carre stated recently:

 

“Big Pharma is engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession,

country by country, worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring

and purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a few years’ time, if Big

Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion

will be hard to find.” 8

 

Doctors are now regularly offered ‘thirty pieces of silver’ bonuses to encourage

patients into trials of newer, more ‘sparkly’ drugs. Says Ismail Shalaby, chief

executive of US-based Nema Medical Research Inc., “There are physicians who can

now net about $500,000 to $1 million a year doing clinical research. That’s not

bad.” 9 Such is the power the big boys wield over the regulatory bodies that any

qualified opinion that questions a particular ‘medicine’ on its jiggery-pokery

route to the public dispensary is immediately rubbished, silenced, fired or

distorted by all means necessary.

 

Dr Michael Elashoff, a former drug evaluator at the FDA, (accent on the word

former) made the mistake of questioning the efficacy GSK’s £multi-million flu

drug Relenza. After painstakingly observing no difference between the groups

monitored, Elashoff concluded that Relenza was “A complete failure.” Very soon

after, it was suggested that it would probably be better if he left the

division. Most definitely, at the regulatory sharp end, the decision is no

longer “Do we approve this drug?” Rather, it is “How?” Despite the warnings from

Elashoff and others, Relenza continues to be sold and has since been linked to

numerous bronchio-spasm deaths in the US, leading to a world-wide warning letter

being issued by GSK advising certain groups against inhaling the powder. 10

 

With the over-arching marketing framework so brazenly corrupt, what about the

actual science taking place within these establishments? Just how neutral are

those neutral knowledge claims? Take this from the UK Independent:

 

‘FALSE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ‘ENDANGERING THE PUBLIC’. Doctors are fabricating

research results to win grants and advance their careers but the medical

establishment is failing to protect the public from the menace of these

scientific frauds, a committee of medical editors said yesterday. Eighty cases

of fraudulent research have been detected in the past four years, and 30 have

been investigated in the past year. In some cases, institutions have covered up

wrongdoing to protect reputations…” 11

 

Aside from the twisting of science itself, the everyday language of the medical

press release can also be very misleading. In Opening Pandora's Box, science

critics Gilbert and Mulkay draw attention to the abundance of double-meaning

phraseology found in many 'scientific sounding' advertisements, articles and

journals. Some well-worn academic phrases that say one thing but mean another

are translated as follows: : It appears that - I think: Correct within an order

of magnitude – Wrong: It is generally believed - A couple of other guys think so

too: It has long been known that - I haven’t bothered to look up the

references: 12

 

Speaking of which, how true is the statement, “It has long been known that

vaccination is effective and safe.”? With MMR, DPT, meningitis, smallpox,

rabies, tetanus and the flu ‘shot’ all billed as such, what should we make of

the UK Prime Minister’s refusal to say whether his baby son has received the

infamous MMR triple jab? Blair’s reticence in this matter displays a strangely

unsupportive role over a vaccine that spearheads his own government’s child

immunisation programme.

 

Perhaps privately, the Blairs have looked up the references on MMR - the

vaccine that has long been known as effective and safe. If so, they will have

discovered that MMR is actually a direct assault upon the child’s delicate

immune system, the child being injected with a toxic concoction of neomycin,

hydrolized gelatine and sorbitol grown in a medium of chicken embryo and tissue

cells harvested from an aborted human foetus’. 13 Now who in their right mind

would wish that on anyone, let alone their own child?

 

And further influencing his decision no doubt, will be Blair's recollections of

his own government’s nationally reported cover-up of 11 child deaths and 16,000

adverse reactions during the recent meningitis immunisation campaign. 14

 

If in this instance, the Blairs have not followed the party line on vaccination,

then they need not feel alone. Even a president has set a precedent over this

issue! On a visit to the Middle East, former US president Bill Clinton refused

the mandatory US army anthrax shot, the vaccine now believed to be at the root

of the strange and debilitating illnesses rendering many Gulf War veterans

virtually immobile.

 

And finally, whilst on the subject of US vaccination policy, Dr Mercola invites

us to consider the link between the great rise in the number of autistic

children in the US and a vaccination policy which currently oversees babies

being given their first vaccine against Hepatitis B in the first two days of

life and another two doses before they are 18 months old. These children also

have five doses of diphtheria and tetanus, two doses of MMR, four of the Hib,

one of chickenpox, four of the polio vaccine and now four doses of a vaccine to

prevent ear infections before they go to school. 15

 

This is nothing short of pharmaceuticals gone mad.

 

If we care about our health, we need to stop and think and ask simple questions

of a group of industies where corruption, self-serving double talk and double

standards and widespread unecessary death and injury are endemic. And it really

isn’t that difficult to navigate this terrain, once we sit down and actually

start to think issues through to their logical conclusion. We must accept that

for much of the time, we have been taught what to think about the conventional

health industry, but not how. Reversing this trend will find us bowing a whole

lot less at the altar of conventional medical science - the false god of our

time, freeing us up to discover a whole range of non-toxic, non-invasive

treatments that successfully prevent and heal the very diseases where

conventional health fails miserably, including cancer, heart disease and

arthritis.

 

A great place to start this journey of discovery is www.campaignfortruth.com

 

Good health to you all in 2002!

 

Steven Ransom,

 

Research Director,

 

Credence Publications

 

www.credence.org

 

www.campaignfortruth.com

 

comments to steve1

 

 

 

References

 

1. University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) research

methodology handout, 1994

 

2. Rio Tinto: Associating with the wrong company

www.corpwatch.org/search/PSR.jsp

 

3. Corporations Behaving Badly: The Ten Worst Corporations of 2001 Russell

Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

http://63.111.165.25/01december/dec01corp1.html

 

4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1767000/1767758.stm

 

5. http://www.drmirkin.com/morehealth/8572.html

 

6. Solomon Hughes, In Health and in Sickness, The Ecologist, Oct, 2001

 

7. BMA News Dec 6th, 2000

 

8. The Nation, New York. Interview with John Le Carré, 9.4.2001

 

9. Drug Trials Hide Conflicts for Doctors, New York Times, 16.01.2001

 

10. Relenza linked to patient deaths in some cases says maker

 

http://webmd.lycos.com/content/article/1728.59243

 

11. Independent Newspapers, 13.12. 2000

 

12. Gilbert & Mulkay Opening Pandora’s Box, Cambridge University Press 1984

 

13. What’s in a vaccine? www.whale.to/vaccines/ingredients1.html

14. Observer Newspapers, 27th August, 2000

 

15. http://www.idph.state.il.us/about/k12sir.htm

 

 

 

 

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