Big Pharma scare tactics: How the pharmaceutical industry influences American consumers

Friday, June 02, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: business ethics, big pharma, FDA reform

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, especially in this case. Lloyd Grove, a columnist for the New York Daily News, says that the pharmaceutical lobby in the United States, a group called PhRMA, actually commissioned the writing of a fiction novel designed to scare Americans into avoiding prescription drugs from Canada. The book was supposed to tell a story of terrorists who altered prescription drugs from Canada in order to kill Americans who were buying them over the internet or crossing the border to buy them at lower prices. Bizarre, huh? What an interesting tactic to try to convince people to pay sky-high prices -- monopoly prices, in fact -- for prescription drugs in the United States. But that's only part of this story.

When the book project fizzled, the authors were offered $100,000 to keep quiet about the deal, says Grove. The book was also supposed to be "dumbed down" for women, because apparently women make up a large part of the prescription drug buyers in the United States, and the people in charge of this project wanted to make sure women could "understand it."

How disrespectful can this pharmaceutical industry be? To what lengths will it go to try to convince us that drugs from outside the United States are unsafe? I wouldn't be surprised if the industry actually commissioned a terrorist attack on drugs from Canada. Then it could say, "Look how unsafe drugs are from Canada! Now you have to buy them here in the United States."

Prescription drugs aren't safe, no matter where you get them

Prescription drugs are actually the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Those are numbers that come out of conventional medicine. The actual number of deaths caused by prescription drugs in this country is actually much higher when you look at independent sources of information, such as the Death by Medicine report, authored in part by Dr. Gary Null. Just type "Death by Medicine" into any search engine, and you'll find that article.

I have a question, though: Suppose the pharmaceutical industry did commission a terrorist attack on the drugs coming from Canada, and suppose the American people started taking those drugs and dying. How would we know? How could we tell the difference between people dying from prescription drugs that are somehow tainted by terrorists, versus people dying from prescription drugs that are dangerous and toxic enough themselves?

People are dropping dead right now from prescription drugs in record numbers. In fact, according to my own analysis, prescription drugs are 16,400 percent more dangerous than terrorists. In other words, if you take all the prescription drug deaths since Sept.11, 2001 and compare it to the number of Americans who have been killed by terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks, the drugs are 16,400 percent more dangerous than terrorists. Drugs are killing more people than terrorists, murderers, car accidents, plane accidents, swimming pool accidents and infant deaths combined. In terms of what's killing people in this country, nothing compares to prescription drugs.

We have a memorial in Washington, D.C. for all the veterans who died in the Vietnam War. It's a wall, and it's a fairly sizeable wall. It would take you some time to go through all the names on that wall. But if we had a wall built to honor all the American citizens who have been killed by FDA-approved prescription drugs, that wall would look like the Great Wall of China. It would stretch on for miles. You would never be able to read every single name on that wall unless you dedicated a couple of years to doing so, because prescription drugs are killing people in this country at a rate that dwarfs the number of deaths in the Vietnam War.

Big Pharma wants to scare consumers away from prescription drug alternatives

In fact, what is happening in this country today is a chemical holocaust. We have drugs that are killing our children, causing them to commit violent acts and suicide. We have drugs that are killing middle-aged people and, of course, we have drugs that are killing our senior citizens in record numbers. What does the drug industry want to do about it? It wants to make sure that you're afraid of alternatives.

The industry message is this: "Don't you dare touch those herbs. Don't you dare think about vitamins, and don't make the mistake of thinking you can get nutrition from food. You need our prescription drugs to keep you healthy. You need to take these drugs every day for the rest of your life. And just in case you might think buying drugs from somewhere else as a way to get a good deal, we'll scare you with language about terrorists somehow tainting prescription drugs from Canada."

By the way, this is not the first time we have heard that language. People in the conventional medical industry brought this up more than a year ago. They said that drugs from Canada were dangerous because terrorists could attack Americans by tainting the prescription drug supply in Canada. They must have really great imaginations to come up with this stuff. It should be the first topic in the book, 101 Ways to Scare Americans into Doing What You Want Them to Do.

In this country, we have all types of fear at work in order to convince you to do something the people in charge want you to do, like giving up your civil liberties or paying ridiculous prices for prescription drugs in the monopoly market in the United States.

Profiteering and social engineering

Some prescription drugs, by the way, are marked up as much as 55,000 percent over the cost of the raw materials. In most industries, that would be called criminal profiteering. In the prescription drug industry, I guess it's just called a return on investment. Shareholders are happy. The board members are happy, and that includes a lot of people who have high-powered positions in Washington. One of our biggest drug companies, Eli Lilly, was once home to people like George Bush, Sr. and Donald Rumsfeld, a man with a strong history in various food and drug giants. There are very strong ties between pharmaceutical companies and the Bush administration. I think that's why you see such a strong push to convince people they have to buy prescription drugs here in the United States at ridiculous prices to treat fictitious diseases that don't even exist, and then stay on those drugs for a lifetime.

The report that the pharmaceutical lobby tried to fund a fiction novel designed to scare Americans away from buying drugs from Canada doesn't surprise me. I think this industry would do anything to make more money. I think it would put people's lives at risk, and I think it has done this and will continue to do so. I think it would fabricate fictitious diseases ("disease mongering") and market those to the American public to try to get people to take more drugs that they don't need. In fact, I think it would collude or conspire with federal regulators to make sure there is a drug-friendly environment in this country that discredits alternatives.

You can call it a conspiracy if you want, but I just call it straight old-fashioned corporate greed. It's all about money, and there's a lot of money changing hands in the drug racket now operating in this country. It's a swell deal if you're the guy at the top, pocketing the take, and if you don't have any ethics. Unfortunately, that's who we have running a lot of the corporations and government departments in this country today. It's sad, but true.

Public education can change the greedy U.S. drug racket

All of this doesn't mean I'm a pessimist. I'm actually a cautious optimist. I think we can change things for the better through public education. My aim is to help people realize how atrocious the pharmaceutical industry is and take action to make positive changes.

Obviously, we need a whole new system of medicine in this country. We need to hold people responsible for the crimes against humanity that are taking place right now in the pharmaceutical industry. I think a number of individuals, CEOs and legislators need to do a little prison time, and clearly the FDA needs wholesale reform from top to bottom so that it can once again act like an agency concerned with protecting the public rather than protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

I think we can make changes for the better. I think we can help people realize the healing power of foods if we teach the fact that foods contain all the medicine we need and that healthy, unprocessed foods make most prescription drugs obsolete. If we can talk about nutrition and the healing power of natural sunlight and physical exercise and drinking pure water, then we can change this world for the better. We can make a difference, and we can move past this era of the dark ages of modern medicine we're living in now. I think that, together, through public education, truth, honesty and integrity, we can unleash a new golden age of nutrition and healing.

That's what I wish to be a part of. That's why I'm bringing you information like this. Even though it may sound scary and negative at first, I just want to open your eyes to what's going on out there, so that I can invite you to a whole new realm of healing where you can live life free of chronic disease, free of fear, free of corruption and free of medical bankruptcies. You can be healthy, happy, energetic, energized and creative. You can be a super healthy human being if you turn to healing foods and do away with conventional medicine -- the "drugs and surgery" approach to "managing disease," which just manages your disease, without actually helping you get rid of it.

I'm all about pointing us in a new direction and continuing to learn from nature. My work is about helping us awaken to the idea that we can be healthier individuals. We can have healthier families, communities, cities, nations and a healthier world if we just realize what's going on and make some positive changes in a meaningful direction.