Pharmaceutical industry accused of crimes against humanity before the ICC in the Hague

Thursday, August 19, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: pharmaceutical industry, war crimes, crimes against humanity

A look at the history of war on planet earth reveals some interesting facts related to the pharmaceutical industry. World War I resulted in the deaths of millions of people. World War II killed tens of millions of people -- not Americans, mind you, but Russians, who ultimately received the greatest number of casualties. Other wars, such as the Vietnam War, resulted in tens of thousands of American deaths, and hundreds of thousands if you look at the total body count. The war on Iraq has now has killed tens of thousands of people as well, most of whom are Iraqi civilians.

But there's another war that is rarely mentioned in the history books that is killing an estimated 12 million people each year around the world. It is an economic war, and a war of control. This war is being waged by the pharmaceutical industry. Today, the industry is being blamed for causing the injury and death of millions of people through the so-called "business with disease", and it is being accused of war crimes before the ICC, the International Criminal Court, in the Hague.

New charges and accusations state that the pharmaceutical industry is committing genocide and was built with the primary goal of controlling health care systems around the world and systematically replacing natural, non-patentable therapies with profitable, synthetic drugs and patentable therapies that could be sold to patients at sky-high prices. For those new to the argument about what's wrong with the pharmaceutical industry, some of these charges might seem outlandish, but in fact, the history of medicine, even in the United States, is full of evidence that supports such a notion. Most people don't know, for example, that the American Medical Association has twice been convicted of conspiracy in the federal courts of the United States of America.

What kind of conspiracy? Conspiracy to suppress non-conventional treatments, most notably chiropractic care. At the turn of the 20th century and throughout the mid-century, the American Medical Association was working very hard to control medicine and outright ban or discredit any therapy that it could not control. In fact, there were assassination attempts made on people who were outspoken against the industry, including a man named Hoxsey, who was a promoter of alternative cancer therapies made with medicinal plants that cured cancer tumors. Certainly, Hoxsey was also a great salesman, and he did himself more harm than good by taking on the persona of a snake oil salesman, but there was much merit to his formulas as has now been revealed by scientific analysis of the phytochemicals present in the medicinal plant ingredients he used and advocated.

Now, with this accusation of crimes against humanity, U.S. Chief Prosecutor Telford Taylor says, "The indictment accuses these men for visiting upon mankind the most devastating and catastrophic war in human history." It is indeed a war against humanity, and it is a war waged for the control of profits, because where there is money to be made, there is power to be grabbed, and the only way the pharmaceutical industry can grab power is by making sure that people don't have access to or don't believe in alternative therapies that could prevent chronic disease or treat disease in more affordable ways.

My comments on this action are as follows: For one, I think the term genocide is misused here. Genocide, in my understanding, refers to an effort to wipe out a specific population or culture. For example, an attempt to exterminate one race would be considered genocide, and as far as I can tell, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't target any particular race. So I don't think genocide really applies here. I think the term is misused in this context.

However, the phrase, "a war against humanity" is somewhat more credible, but still, I don't think that the intentions of the pharmaceutical industry are to wipe out mankind or to actually declare war on people. I think the pharmaceutical industry is engaged in nothing more than economic conquest. It's all about dollars and greed and profits, and not at all about trying to do evil in the world. In fact, I believe that the people running the pharmaceutical companies believe that they themselves are doing tremendous good.

This is the nature of evil -- people who are involved in it often think that they are on an important mission to find the cure for cancer, for example, and the only way to do that is to sell more drugs, and generate more profits, and put that money back into research in the hopes that someday they will find the cure. This is all self-deception, of course, because it's not money that is lacking for a cancer cure -- it's the myopic paradigms of conventional medicine that stand in the way. And besides, cancer already has many cures available if people would simply look beyond conventional medicine and prescription drugs.

So I don't think they are evil people, and I don't think that they would consciously intend to harm humanity. What I do think is that they are blinded by their greed. They're going after profits no matter what the cost, and they are justifying their actions by claiming they are doing research that would someday cure certain diseases -- and that's a promise we know will never unfold.

The kind of psychological justification going on in the minds of people who work at pharmaceutical companies is probably very much like the justification that was going on in the minds of Nazi soldiers who guarded the Berlin wall (and who shot people who were attempting to cross the wall). These soldiers were just "following orders", which is much the same justification that pharmaceutical company employees take home with them every single day. They're just doing a job -- they're just making a salary and trying to support their family.

What people don't realize is that when they are part of a machine that is, in one way or another, causing great harm to humanity, they are in effect responsible for their role in that outcome. Just because a person is a salaried employee and doesn't have executive control over the company doesn't excuse the fact that they are, in essence, enabling a system that trades health for profits, that seeks to exploit the diseased and dying in our world in order to generate shareholder value for investors. It doesn't excuse the fact that this is an industry that has sought to systematically wipe out and discredited alternative therapies in order to maintain control and keep customers lining up at doctor's offices across the country and around the world.

Just because a person isn't a board member at a pharmaceutical company doesn't excuse the fact that they are part of a team that is pushing prescription drugs that haven't been proven safe onto an unwary population. It doesn't excuse the exaggerations in the marketing materials nor the number of deaths, injuries, birth defects, neurological disorders, and other problems that are created by the frequent consumption of prescription drugs.

My point here is that people who work in pharmaceutical companies are probably ordinary, everyday people who have their own wishes and dreams and families, and, at their core, attempt to do no evil. Nevertheless, they are part of a system that is inevitably creating a highly destructive outcome. It is impairing the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people, and it is causing the premature deaths of countless others. Whether you wish to call that a war against humanity or genocide is certainly your decision. In my view, I just call it corporate greed.