America's Most Poisonous Pill
America is swallowing a deadly poison pill marketed & provided by the Pharmaceutical Industry and PsychiatryFrom thefix.com comes this must read article outlining the corporate and medical abuses now being orchestrated by the pharmaceutical industry and Psychiatry upon America & the World. I encourage you read the whole article at the link thefix.com and further yet read this book upon it's release.
This is not new breaking news for those that have been following this tragedy for the past few decades; but this is a well written and informative article you'll want to pass along to family, friends, and colleagues
Christopher Byron is a prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author. This article is excerpted from his forthcoming book, Mind Drugs, Inc.: How Big Pharma and Modern Psychiatry Have Corrupted Washington and Destroyed Mental Health in America.
Klonopin has been striking down more than just troubled celebrities, however. In 2008, reports began to surface of soldiers returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder who were dying in their sleep, the victims of a psych-med cocktail of Klonopin, Paxil (an antidepressant), and Seroquel (an antipsychotic) that is routinely prescribed by VA hospitals.
Hospital emergency room visits for benzodiazepine abuse now dwarf—by a more than a three-to-one margin—those for any illegal street drug.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union reportedly used temazepam (another benzodiazepine drug) extensively to keep political dissidents in a drugged-out state in government-run psychiatric hospitals. Both the CIA and the KGB are also said to have also used the sleeping pill in prisoner interrogations and in research into mind-control, brainwashing and social engineering.
Why has all this happened? In large measure you can thank the 47,000 members of the American psychiatric profession for this dreadful state of affairs. Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor the psychiatric profession would be anywhere near as lucrative as they are today without their mutual support system. Together they have created a marketing juggernaut that over the last 20 years has spawned a seemingly nonstop gusher of profits that is only now beginning to slow—and probably only temporarily.
The scholarly journals of the psychiatric profession were filled with early warnings, beginning almost 50 years ago, from those who could see where the encroaching influence of the drug companies was destined to lead the profession. Now, even the medical journals themselves have been corrupted by the hidden hand of Big Pharma. In 2008, the New York Times reported that a survey of the six top medical journals showed that on average almost 8% of the bylined articles published in their pages were ghostwritten by freelance writers, then published under the names of cooperating doctors and researchers to give the pro-drug messages contained in the articles the appearance of impartiality. The scheme is bankrolled, of course, by the company that makes the drug.
Consider Dr. Joseph Biederman, the world-renowned Harvard University psychiatrist and father of modern psychopharmacology for children, who, it now turns out, has been taking secret “consulting fees” from drug companies for years. Biederman is widely credited with legitimizing the concept of “bipolar disorder” as a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be corrected with psychiatric drugs. But documents uncovered by Senate investigators probing ties between the psychiatric profession and the drug industry, which have resulted in an explosion in medically approved uses for psychiatric drugs for children, show that Biederman received more than $1.6 million in undisclosed payments since 2000 from the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing the drugs he was encouraging parents to give to their children if they appeared to be “bipolar.”
It's obvious that this system incentivizes doctors financially to keep prescribing drugs in order to keep patients returning for med-checks. But Big Pharma offers a whole host of additional income opportunities. Last year, ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize–winning public-interest investigative website, did an extensive report on the financial compensation drug companies shower on physicians. Well-titled “Dollars for Docs,” this series included a database of more than 17,000 doctors who accepted “speaker fees” and other money from eight drug companies in 2009 and 2010 totaling $320 million.
That accounting is only the tip of the iceberg, however, as most pharmaceutical companies have refused to disclose their physician payments. Not surprisingly, most doctors interviewed by ProPublica denied that their medical decisions and prescribing habits were influenced by drug company payments. The new healthcare reform bill calls for greater transparency, requiring all drug-makers to disclose all fees paid to all doctors by 2014. Until then, you can type your doctor’s name into the database to find out if he or she is on the pharma take, and for how much.
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Sad to say poor Stan didn’t get elected in the recent poll in Halifax, Canada. He failed by an impressively large margin.
Still, I’m sure he’ll be back at some point and perhaps by then we will have seen Study 329 retracted… it is still on the books, still saying, “Paroxetine is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents.
It’s a testimonial to the worst of times, and it needs to be retracted for the same reason that the statues and monuments of despots are destroyed when their regimes finally fall”.
So says a retired physchiatrist, 1 Boring Old Man, in this article.
I have to agree that it’s high time Study 329 was retracted – and Marty Keller and Stan and the rest of the doctors that put their names to it were put under the spotlight and called to account for their actions.
I know it’ll never happen, but I can’t shake the feeling that Keller and Kutcher played their parts (together with GlaxoSmithkline) in what amounted to a physical assault on me. The study said Seroxat didn’t work, but rather than admit the fact, all parties lied and cheated in order to shore up the profile of what I can only describe as a harmful chemical that should never have been allowed to be prescribed so widely.
The bottom line for Keller, Kutcher et al was the money Glaxo paid them to lie about the efficacy and safety of Paxil/Seroxat.
The bottom line for Glaxo was (and still is) the billions in profit it makes each year.
Who picks up the pieces? – I do, every day – and so do all the other patients that were harmed by what Keller, Kutcher and Glaxo all knew to be a dangerous drug that didn’t actually work.
Read more in Alison’s Bass’ book Side Effects - the complete story of Study 329
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It is past time to say enough is enough....make your voice heard from the town square to the Representative halls of Washington DC...corruption & greed adversely effecting the health of America can NO LONGER BE TOLERATED...
A retraction of study 329 would be a nice beginning. Yet, what actually needs to happen to bring any form of effective change at this juncture; is a huge asterisk being placed by the name of each KOL involved on everything they have been associated with since 329 (which would include hundreds of studies & journal articles).
You can’t stop a runaway locomotive by simply throwing this single study on the tracks. The pharmaceutical machine will roll on by like someone placed a penny on the tracks for entertainment. These (criminals) doctors knew exactly what they were doing; it’s past time for substantial consequences to be distributed among them.
The analogy: You can’t kill the Greek mythological creature Typhon (Big Pharma) and Echidna (psychiatry) and their multitude of off spring by severing a single head. For we know that simply removing one head from these ravenous beast will not slow their rampage, or refrain them from inevitably devouring us all under the pretext of genotype and bio-markers…in essence society is being found guilty of mental disease until proven innocence or otherwise....all for profit