Big Pharma successfully bribes officials in India to allow sale of dangerous, deadly drugs

Monday, July 29, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: Big Pharma, bribery, India

(NaturalNews) The regulatory authority in India responsible for approving pharmaceutical drugs has obviously taken some cues from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as a new government report highlights some very serious corruption going on in that country. According to Reuters, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO), which is basically India's version of the FDA, has been fraudulently approving drugs in exchange for kickbacks and bribes, and operating primarily for the benefit of Big Pharma rather than for the Indian people.

Much like the FDA, CDSCO is heavily influenced by the drug industry, and has been caught colluding with drug companies to fast-track approval for drugs, for instance, without requiring them to complete all stages of safety approval and clinical trials. India's parliament, which compiled a 78-page report as part of an in-depth investigation, confirms that CDSCO has not only violated drug approval provisions in numerous instances, but has also put millions of Indian patients at significant risk in the process.

"There is sufficient evidence on record to conclude that there is collusive nexus between drug manufacturers, some functionaries of CDSCO and some medical experts," explains the report. "Such irregular approvals spare drug producers the cost and efforts but put Indian patients at risk."

One major area of concern is CDSCO's lack of oversight of the clinical trial process, which itself is riddled with loopholes that are routinely exploited by Big Pharma. And rather than tighten these restrictions and assume an active role in ensuring that all approved drugs are first tested in accordance with the law, CDSCO has instead chosen to look the other way and even facilitate such crimes against humanity.

"The regulatory procedures are not at all stringent in India and there is a general apathy towards human life," said Siddhant Khandekar, a healthcare analyst at ICICI Direct in Mumbai, about the situation. "We are sitting on a time bomb and it will soon explode if corrective measures are not taken."

FDA and CDSCO are both corrupt, and both put profits before people

The snowballing scandal involving CDSCO's role in aiding and abetting Big Pharma's criminal endeavors is not really a shock, especially when you consider the fact that the FDA has been doing the exact same thing in the U.S. for many decades now. The only difference is that India's parliament is actually now trying to address the issue and bring it to light, while U.S. lawmakers continue to themselves collude with both Big Pharma and the FDA.

Just last week, the FDA actually proposed loosening the already-lax requirements for drug approval by allowing many new drugs to gain market approval without safety testing or clinical trials. If the FDA and so-called medical experts perceive a new drug as being potentially beneficial, the agency wants to be able to simply approve it now and ask questions later (http://www.reuters.com).

So in essence, the FDA is just as bad as CDSCO, if not worse. And yet there is no investigation into the FDA's coalescence with the drug industry taking place here in the U.S. like is being done in India. It can now be said that the government of a developing country in the Far East is actually more concerned with protecting its people than is our own supposed government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.reuters.com

http://www.bloomberg.com