Prescription drugs kill thousands of times as many people as ephedra

Sunday, November 09, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: the FDA, prescription drugs, drug company profits

The war against ephedra is nothing more than a smoke screen to distract people from the far more dangerous effects of prescription drugs. If prescription drugs and over the counter drugs were measured by the same yardstick, more than half of all drugs would be banned outright.

Prescription drugs cause more than 100,000 deaths each year. They injure 2.2 million people each year. And over-the-counter drug are no better: ibuprofen and other NSAIDS account for more than 40,000 deaths each year from gastrointestinal hemorrhaging. And yet nobody in Congress is calling for these drugs to be pulled off the market, and the FDA mysteriously allows their continued sale, knowing full well that the number of deaths caused by prescription drugs is enormous.

Ephedra has admittedly resulted in the deaths of a handful of people. Ibuprofen has killed hundreds of thousands, even according to medicine's own research as published in JAMA and other "scientific" journals. If this is really about science and protecting the public, as is claimed by supporters of the ban, then why not protect the public from dangerous pharmaceuticals at the same time?

The answer, of course, is that profits must be protected first. In the world of medicine, it's profits first, and customers second. And if you can generate another billion dollars in profit in exchange for a few thousand deaths, then it's business as usual in Big Medicine, not unlike Big Tobacco.

The only substances under real scrutiny by the FDA are those that threaten the profits of the drug companies. And this brings us to the real mission of the FDA: to protect drug company profits, not the health of the public.

In reality, the FDA is far more dangerous to your health than ephedra.