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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
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@onetel.net.uk
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
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