FDA accused of suppressing drug safety information (commentary)

Friday, October 14, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: dangerous drugs, the FDA, FDA reform

Here's a report on the FDA that could only come from outside the United States. I'm reading to you from The Independent, a British newspaper, that says, "Vital data on prescription medication found in millions of British homes has been suppressed by the powerful U.S. drug regulators, even though the information could potentially save lives." An investigation by The Independent states that, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, the American Food and Drug Administration routinely conceals information it considers commercially sensitive, leaving medical specialists unable to assess the true risks.

This no surprise to those who are regular readers of this site, but to a lot of consumers in the United States, it is a big surprise. They can't believe that the Food and Drug Administration would censor and suppress drug safety information. They think the FDA is looking out to protect them. The heroic FDA, protecting American consumers from greedy drug companies selling dangerous drugs, putting public safety first and corporate profits last. Of course, that's all a myth.

The real FDA: Profits first, safety last

Here's the real FDA, in my view: Colluding with drug companies, suppressing clinical trial data, covering up the truth about dangerous prescription drugs, refusing to pull drugs off the market even though they are literally killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. The FDA: Censoring its own drug safety scientists to make sure they don't go public with their information about how dangerous these drugs are. The FDA: Under the table deals with drug companies? Maybe. Lots of political influence with the leaders of drug companies? Probably. Covering up facts about the dangers of prescription drugs? Most definitely. Absolutely. Without question.

This is the FDA that we have here in the United States, running the drug industry. Running it! The FDA that tries to create a monopoly drug market in this country by banning the import of generic prescription drugs from elsewhere around the world. This is an agency that has attempted again and again to discredit Chinese medicine, nutritional supplements, herbal medicine and anything that would compete with prescription drugs. It has sought to outlaw these natural substances and herbs that have been proven healers for literally 2,000 years in the history of medicine. This is the FDA that has put drug profits first, and public safety last, time and time again.

This is the agency that rigs its own safety panels. "Oh, is there a dangerous drug out there? Let's have a panel and a hearing. Let's rig the hearing with decision makers who are paid by pharmaceutical companies. They're the ones who will get to vote." Wow, what a big surprise. They all voted to make the drug legal again. That's what happened with Vioxx. Oh, it only killed 50,000 or 60,000 people. "Ahh, that's just a side effect," they said, and the panel voted to put it back on the market. "It's safe enough for us. We're the FDA." Apparently, a drug has to kill more than 60,000 people to be considered dangerous.

Does it have to kill half a million people to be pulled by the FDA? How many Americans have to die before the FDA says, "This is a dangerous drug. Maybe it shouldn't be on the market?" How many children have to be doped up on antidepressants, committing suicide and shooting each other in public schools before the FDA says, "Well, maybe children shouldn't be on these dangerous drugs that alter brain chemistry?" Think about this.

How many senior citizens have to die of gastrointestinal bleeding from the consumption of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) before the FDA will say, "Gee, maybe they should have a warning on them?" How many people have to die in this country before the FDA will stand up and do its job? When will the American people start listening?

You know, everywhere else around the world, the FDA is a complete joke. Here's The Independent in the U.K., doing a report on the FDA that you probably would never see in the United States. Why not? Because the mass media apologizes for the drug industry, and most of the media outlets in this country are funded by drug money. Look at any magazine, newspaper, or cable news program, and what do you see? Drug ads. Those ads are paying the salaries of the very people who decide what's news and what isn't.

Drugs, drugs everywhere

Have you picked up a magazine lately? Have you picked up any of those news magazines on the newsstands? Have you picked up a medical journal? Did you notice that they're 50 percent drug ads? There's hardly any news in the news magazines at all. The news that you find is highly censored and edited. Much of the bad news about drugs is suppressed.

Have you looked around your local community lately? Did you notice how many pharmacies are being constructed? There's a drug store on every corner, it seems. Even grocery stores are building pharmacies like mad. Everyone wants to get in the drug business all of a sudden. It's like we have a country of drug pushers, drug runners, drug retailers, drug manufacturers and drug apologizers. And who's the Al Capone running the drug racket? The FDA, of course.

And then we have this "War on drugs," which does really important things like outlawing hemp. Oh yes, hemp is so dangerous. My God, you can make paper with it! It's so dangerous, this hemp. You can make a pair of jeans out of hemp. You can make sails for ships out of hemp, as some history buffs know. You can make car bumpers out of hemp and recyclable car parts. You can make biodiesel out of hemp. Oh, you can make a lot of things out of hemp, including highly nutritious hemp seeds, loaded with omega-3 fatty acids, outstanding for health and human nutrition. The one thing you can't do with hemp is get high from smoking it. The THC content is so low in industrial hemp that you'd have to smoke a hundred pounds of hemp just to feel anything resembling a buzz. And yet we have to outlaw hemp in this country because we're fighting "the war on drugs!" Meanwhile, the real drug threat is prescription drugs. They're the 4th leading cause of death in this country. And they remain perfectly legal. Hmmm... are the politicians smoking crack?

America is a drug nation

The FDA: The Fraud and Drug Administration. Making sure everyone in America has the right to keep on buying, selling and consuming drugs. I remember we used to have a society in which Nancy Regan would teach children to say, "Just say no to drugs." We used to have signs in front of our schools that said, "This is a drug-free zone." In fact, we still have some of these signs, but if you walk past these signs and walk into the school, you find out that as many as 30 to 40 percent of these children are on drugs. They're on powerful narcotics that have been prescribed to them by doctors, psychiatrists and school counselors, and pushed onto them by school administrators and parents who are cowering in fear over what might happen if their little Johnny doesn't stop being so hyper. We've got to put them on drugs! It's a drug nation; a pharmaceutical factory. We have so many kids on drugs that they've actually made it illegal not to put your kids on drugs!

There's a family that fought child protective services authorities because they didn't want to put their daughter on chemotherapy drugs. They wanted to treat their daughter naturally, with their own method of healing. But the state said, "No, you can't do that. We're going to force your child to be poisoned with chemotherapeutic agents that generate profits for prescription drug companies... chemical agents that don't have any sort of documented benefit for enhancing the lifespan of kids or adult patients, and yet are used by every oncologist in the country. We're going to force these drugs into the body and bloodstream of your daughter. We're going to take your daughter away from you." And they did. That's how drugged up we are in this nation. We've made drugs mandatory.

We're drugging each other, and when we refuse to be drugged, we invoke the law and steal children from parents and put people in jail; yet, you still can't grow hemp. Oh no, hemp's dangerous. Oh boy, what would happen if everyone grew hemp? Gee, let's see, you'd have a huge multi-billion dollar industry for American farmers. Wouldn't that be terrible? Let's see, you'd have a renewable energy source, you'd have a crop that's good for the environment, a crop that doesn't need to be grown with pesticides or herbicides. Wouldn't that be terrible? To re-invigorate the whole farming industry in this country? Gotta outlaw hemp, but keep those drugs pumping.

Keep that drug economy pumping!

Keep that drug industry legal. Keep on poisoning the hearts, minds, bodies and nervous systems of all the people in this country. You've got to keep them on drugs. Why? Well, drugs are profitable. We're all invested in the drug companies. Gee, if the drug companies weren't making money, people wouldn't have their retirement portfolios, so you sure don't want to do anything that would harm the drug companies. You gotta keep everything moving along. That's what the Fraud and Drug Administration helps do: Keep it all pumping right along and keep those drugs coursing through the veins of our people.

How many drugs? So many that you can now find traces of these drugs in the public water supplies. If you put a little drug sensor at the end of the Mississippi river where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico, you can find drugs – prescription drugs – just coming right on down the river. Here they come! We could bottle these up and sell them back to the same people who took them once already. These drugs are, of course, killing the oceans, the coral reefs and the ocean life in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico is half dead now, which is better than the American population, which is half brain dead. We're all on statin and antidepressant drugs and other kinds of prescription drugs that basically sap our cognitive ability, sap our lucidity and take away our ability to think clearly about issues like health.

Information suppression and other tricks of the FDA's trade

Now, getting back to the report by The Independent, one team of investigators found that 28 pages of data had been removed from the FDA files on a new family of painkillers because of what? Confidentiality. It's a trade secret. That's how the FDA covers up negative information. "Gee, did the study show that 10 percent of the people died from heart attacks? Don't worry. We can just call it a trade secret. Then we'll take it out of the official report. No one will know."

Information about cox-2 inhibitors has been suppressed. One of the Swiss investigators, Dr. Peter Juni, who helped expose the risks of these drugs, claims the FDA obstructed his efforts. We all know about the suppression of Dr. David Graham's testimony by the FDA, and how he had been threatened in a variety of ways to make sure that he wouldn't go public with his information. Finally, he was able to testify before Congress, something the FDA certainly did not like. And this is a guy who works there.

There is another guy, Dr. Andrew Mosholder, an expert at the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, who presented an analysis of 22 different studies on more than 4,000 children, covering nine antidepressants. He found that the risk of suicide-related events was twice that of children given a placebo. For those who can't do the math, that's a 200 percent increase, or twice the chance. That's a tremendous increase in the risk of suicide-related events for taking these drugs.

The FDA is committing crimes against humanity

Keep on dosing these children. That's right, call it a brain chemistry imbalance and put those kids on drugs. It's not like children need to do things like play outdoors. It's not like they need physical exercise and sunshine. It's not like they need healthy school lunches or good nutrition. It's not like they need any of that. What they need is drugs. Clearly. The evidence shows it; this is medical science here, and this is clinically proven stuff. This is rational medicine; this is scientifically based.

Oh yeah, we have a bunch of people with a bunch of initials after their names (also known as "psychiatrists"), and they say, "Give the kids more drugs." That's what's happening in the country today. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight. Now, all of this just confirms what I've been saying about the FDA all along. While some people are out there talking about, "Let's reform the FDA," my view continues to be, "Let's arrest the FDA." Let's make some arrests. Let's get some criminal convictions of these people, because in my view they are committing crimes against humanity.

That's what's really going on here. Crimes against humanity. These are not small violations of local law. This is not some guy at WorldCom fixing the numbers to move a couple of billion dollars into his private bank account. These are bureaucrats, decision makers, even politicians, who have been given the responsibility of protecting the public and who have sold out that responsibility. They have sold their souls in exchange for whatever money or power they're receiving from the drug industry. They have sold out.

The drugging of our children is a chemical holocaust

Do you know who's paying the price? Our children -- the health and the minds of our children. And the rest of the population too, you name it: Adults, senior citizens, expectant mothers – forty percent of our nation is now on prescription drugs. It is unprecedented in the history of the world. The level of corruption and the number of criminals now running our health care system is unprecedented in the history of the world. These are criminals who need to be arrested. Someone in a position of authority – someone like the Attorney General – needs to run in there and make some arrests.

Set an example that says, "Hey, you know what? You cannot conduct this kind of chemical holocaust on the children of our nation and get away with it. You can't do this in America." America is the land of the free, the home of the brave and a country where we're supposed to understand what justice is all about and where we fought for freedom, they say. Freedom of what? Freedom to keep dosing our children on prescription drugs? No! I say we have the freedom to know the truth about the drug companies.

The only freedoms we're really fighting for are freedoms like the one I'm exercising here, freedom of speech. This is the one freedom that is the most powerful of all, because it is the freedom that can protect all the other freedoms, and, ultimately, our children. It can protect us from the criminals running our nation. Criminals like those at the FDA.

Legalize hemp and make long-term prescription drug use illegal

Now, if we had honest leaders in this country, prescription drugs would be illegal, at least for long-term use, and hemp would be legal. We could grow hemp for industrial use. Create new revenues streams for farmers. Grow our own biodiesel and reduce our need to import foreign oil.

At the same time, we need to outlaw many prescription drugs, especially for long-term use. We need to outlaw, for one thing, the use of these drugs in children. Instead of doing the responsible thing of addressing children's nutritional habits, of taking junk foods out of schools, banning the advertising of soft drinks, junk foods and sugar cereals to children, instead of giving them some recess time, what do we do? We drug them. We say, "Oh, well, they just have some brain chemistry imbalance," and we dose them full of drugs.

That is not an answer to the problems of our nation. We need to ban these drugs; we need to outlaw them. And we need to arrest these criminals at the FDA and the criminals at the top of these drug companies who are allowing this to happen; in fact, they're pushing for it. They're devising new ways to drug more and more people with more and more prescription drugs as the years go by. They're actually fabricating new diseases and finding ways to convince people they are "afflicted" with completely fictitious disorders like "Social Anxiety Disorder" or "Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder."

Drug companies can't wait for the coming wave of Alzheimer's patients. They just drool over the diabetes numbers, because more and more American citizens are gong to be diabetic in the years ahead. That has them patting themselves on the back, rubbing their hands in greed, "Oh, can't wait for those diabetes people. They're going to need a lot of drugs for that."

The medical destruction of the USA

Something has got to change around here. And it may be too late. It really may be, because our nation is destroying itself. It's drugging itself into oblivion, and, all the while, spending more money than it has available. We're spending ourselves into medical bankruptcy – all the while hiding behind this illusion of so-called science-based medicine.

We are missing out on a huge opportunity to do something productive; something like teaching expectant mothers how to have healthy babies through nutrition or teaching superlearning strategies all children that involve new learning technologies. We are missing the opportunity to combine that with outstanding nutrition and the mass consumption of essential fatty acids that are absolutely crucial for healthy brain development development.

Our medical system had a great opportunity, a golden opportunity to do something really helpful for humanity, and they flushed it away out of a quest for profits. The Fraud and Drug Administration stands at the top of this pyramid of control, pulling the strings and making sure the Drug Empire continues to tighten its iron grip. And it has happened. More people are taking drugs. Drugs are more and more profitable, dangerous drugs are not removed from the market and Americans have few alternative choices. That's what's happening today, and if you aren't outraged by it, then you are not aware of what's going on.

America has been conned by the FDA

If you think all these drugs are medically justified, you've been conned. If you think doctors have been trained on how to help people be healthy, then you've been fooled. These drugs haven't been proven safe, and the FDA is not looking out for the public safety. Just like every other American out there, you've been conned. And the whole world is laughing at us; that is, when we're not bombing them.

So, I just have one question from all of this: for how long will the American people allow this to continue? I'm really curious because I want to know. Will the people continue to allow their children and their senior citizens to be drugged? Will they continue to allow drug companies to extract more and more dollars from their pockets and leave them in financial ruin? Is this what people are going to allow to continue happening in this country?

Because maybe the answer is they'll allow it forever. Maybe they'll never be the wiser. Keep on eating those processed foods, those junk foods, those restaurant foods, all those unhealthy, toxic, disease-causing ingredients. Keep on buying those personal care products, coating your hair in cancer-causing ingredients, coloring your hair with cancer-causing solvents. That's right. Keep on drinking all that alcohol, smoking all those cigarettes, watching that prime-time television sitcom to distract yourself from the crumbling of our nation that's happening all around you this very minute. We've got to keep people distracted. Maybe they won't notice.

Keep them drugged up. They'll just keep on working, because somebody's got to pay for all this, right? Somebody's got to foot the bill. And the person footing the bill is, of course, Joe Public. Nearly every American consumer out there is writing a check to the drug companies right now, and saying, "Keep on drugging me, my children and my parents in the nursing home. I'm going to keep writing you checks until I have no more money left. I'm going to keep on writing them anyway after that, and put myself in medical bankruptcy, just to stay addicted to these prescription and over-the-counter drugs." That's what Americans are saying right now.

And the FDA must be standing back watching, laughing its head off, thinking, "Wow, it worked." It's what they must be thinking right now. "I can't believe we pulled this off! They bought it. Can you believe it? These people are suckers, they bought it!"

And by the way, there's another new disease out there that's very dangerous to your health. It's called "Conventional Medicine Belief Disorder" (CMBD) and its primary symptom is an irrational belief in a system of medicine that has nothing to do with promoting health. The cure for CMBD isn't a drug, it's an ANTI-drug. What is the ANTI-drug? That will be revealed in a later article. But here's a hint: you don't need a prescription to get it. Thanks for tuning in to this commentary.