Med Mob Has Groomed 70 Percent of Americans on Prescription Drugs

Dees Art

Heather Callaghan

Have you ever had a family member come home with a drug sample? Kind of like those Wal-Mart product samples you can get in the mail except it's handed to you in good faith by an authority. Prescription medicines are the first go-to solution of doctors for almost any type of ailment.

Recently, Mayo Clinic research found that 70% or 7 out of 10 people in the U.S. are on prescription drugs. Twenty percent are on five or more prescriptions. Shocking as that may seem, it isn't really when one considers that some of those prescriptions were most likely given to combat the side effects of the original prescriptions.

Strangely, or not so strangely, 7 out of 10 deaths each year are from chronic disease like heart, strokes, and cancer. Almost one out of every two Americans suffered from a chronic illness in 2005. (Source) This system is working out great - just not for U.S. patients.

CDC to ‘Study’ Gun Violence, Ignore Link to Antidepressants

Melissa Melton

Guns weren’t the only weapons involved in many of our nation’s mass shootings over the last two decades.

After the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last December, President Obama signed 23 executive orders relating to guns and gun violence in this country. Of those 23, seven were specifically related to mental health issues. One of the orders directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to identify and research the most pressing topics related to the causes of gun violence.

The CDC asked an Institute of Medicine committee to set the agenda for this research, which was just released last week:

The committee’s proposed research agenda focuses on the characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, the impact of gun safety technology, and the influence of video games and other media.

How ironic that it’s called the ‘Institute of Medicine’ and yet, the organization is going to completely ignore the obvious role that psychotropic medicines such as antidepressants have had in many of the mass shootings in this country in the last twenty years. In fact, medications are not mentioned even once in the entire four-page research agenda.

Joe Rogan & The Pharmaceutical Industry: Prescribing Happiness

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The Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex: A Deadly Fairy Tale

Dr. Doug Henderson and Dr. Gary Null
Global Research

It has been a particularly bad month for the pharmaceutical industrial complex in its ongoing litigations in American courts. Among the main pharmaceutical headlines, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine for HPV, now being widely administered to pre-teens, was found to be linked to amyltrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease; following a $1.4 billion fine in promoting one of its blockbuster drugs Zyprexa off-label, deceptive correspondence was uncovered by Eli Lilly gaming the system again by promoting another one of its drugs, Cymbalta, off-label for fibromyalgia; AstraZeneca was fined $160 million for scamming the Medicaid system in Kentucky after being fined $215 million for ripping off Alabama; Glaxo lost a Pennsylvania trial for failing to warn doctors and pregnant women of the dangers of its antidepressant drug Paxil related to birth defects; and Pfizer scored a record-breaking fine of $2.3 billion for illegally marketing several drugs over the years: Bextra, Zyvox, Geodon and Lyrica. These kinds of charges, among the many others, have become a habit for drug makers for the past dozen years.

When we speak of the pharmaceutical industry complex, it does not refer solely to private drug manufacturers. The complex, like a Matrix that holds captive the health of the nation in medical slavery by its own design and manipulation, is a consortium, a spiders’ web woven with financial attachments throughout the medical profession. In addition to the pharmaceutical and medical device firms, this complex includes every government health agency—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and or course the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—as well as drug lobbying firms now employing a large number of former Congresspersons, insurance and HMO companies, all of the leading professional medical associations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the majority of medical schools and their research departments who are heavily funded by drug money, many of the most prestigious medical journals, and ultimately all of this filtering downward to the physicians who diagnose our illnesses and prescribe our medications and treatments.
America is rightly regarded as having led much of the world in many qualitative innovations in all fields. That reputation is duly deserved. However, there is a new dynamic at work that is causing this reputation to be challenged. We are a nation that prides itself in our humanity, our sense of fairness, but today there is a growing concern that we are now being monikered as a country held hostage to a national security complex, which includes the largest military complex in the world, an obscenely expensive healthcare system and self-serving bureaucracies and private industries that serve their own financial ends. So it is not surprising that after spending this year $2.6 trillion on healthcare, we have such little health to show for it. There are second world countries where people live longer and healthier lives. And we have the worst healthcare among developed nations. So what have we received for our $2.6 trillion.

As the current healthcare debate continues to rage over in sundries—the $200 billion net profit health insurance industry—the entire deliberation over disease prevention and treatment has been overshadowed. And amidst this partisan and ideological anarchy, perpetuated by our elected officials, the media, and fueled by the pharmaceutical complex, two other areas America excels as a leader above all other developed nations is in being the premier breeding ground for the pharmaceutical industrial complex’s greatest profits and, second, as the world’s exemplar in medical fraud and corruption. The fairy tale of America’s health as being best served by drugs is a creation of this complex, a lullaby that brings ill citizens repeatedly to their doctors and hospitals for diagnosis and treatment, or simply to deny healthcare altogether to the uninsured.

The country is pacified by a blind belief that the drugs being prescribed to them have been proven safe because our government health agencies have our physical health and well-being in their best intentions.  This is a lie, an extraordinarily deadly lie. Iatrogenesis, medically induced injury and death, is the number one cause of death in American medicine annually, since only a small percentage of these deaths are actually reported. Each year more Americans die from preventable deaths due to our medical system than all military causalities in the two world wars combined. This is tantamount to medical genocide. One of the major causes of these deaths is the overmedication of Americans in all ages. The constant need for profits has created an environment that allows the pharmaceutical industrial complex to use their enormous financial and political clout to literally make normal life experiences into new diseases, such as social anxiety disorder, in order to sell its drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has been given the authority to pathologize life, with the drugging of our children, seniors, etc. For example, the leading cause of AIDS deaths today is a result of liver failure. This is not a condition of HIV infection, but a direct result of the anti-HIV drug AZT. Is it little wonder then that we are being intimidated and frightened into believing that mandatory vaccination is being touted even though the science of efficacy and safety, even the need, for these new swine flu vaccines is patently unproven. It is perhaps one of the largest falsehoods ever perpetuated on humanity that dwarfs the sleaze on Wall Street.

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States linking prescription databases, fight abuse

Emery P. Dalesio
Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. — Starting next year, dozens of states will begin knitting together databases to watch prescription drug abuse, from powerful painkillers to diet pills.

With federal money and prodding, states are being asked to sign onto an agreement allowing police, pharmacies and physicians to check suspicious prescription pill patterns from Nevada to North Carolina.

Civil liberties and privacy advocates have objected to the state databases, which would be linked with technology and standards developed by the Justice and Homeland Security departments.

Thirty-four states operate databases to fight a drug problem authorities say is growing more deadly than heroin.



"I've got people that are kin to me that's addicted and I see firsthand what it does," said Tracy Carter, sheriff in Lee County, N.C.. about 30 miles southwest of Raleigh. "The thing that's so darn frustrating is our young people don't think it's that big of a deal. 'It's a pill. It won't hurt me. The doctor prescribed it.' But it's worse than crack cocaine."

North Carolina had 826 unintentional deaths due to controlled substances last year, said Bill Bronson, the state health official in charge of the database. In comparison, there were 482 homicides statewide.

Nationally, there were 27,658 overdose deaths from prescription medication in 2007 – more than heroin and cocaine combined, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in July. The threat is increasing as the most addictive pain relievers including OxyContin, which can produce a euphoric feeling, become more common, the Drug Enforcement Administration said.

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10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased

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Are We Giving Our Soldiers Drugs That Make Them Kill Themselves?

More soldiers than ever are on drugs that have been linked to suicide and violent behavior.

Martha Rosenberg
Alternet

In 2009 there were 160 active duty suicides, 239 suicides within the total Army including the Reserves, 146 active duty deaths from drug overdoses and high risk behavior and 1,713 suicide attempts. In addition to suicide, other out-of-character behavior like domestic violence is known to erupt from the drugs.

More troops are dying by their own hand than in combat, according to an Army report titled "Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention." Not only that, but 36 percent of the suicides were troops who were never deployed.


The unprecedented suicide rates are accompanied by an unprecedented rise in psychoactive drug rate among active duty-aged troops, 18 to 34, which is up 85 percent since 2003, according to the military health plan Tricare. Since 2001, 73,103 prescriptions for Zoloft have been dispensed, 38,199 for Prozac, 17,830 for Paxil and 12,047 for Cymbalta says Tricare 2009 data, which includes family prescriptions. All of the drugs carry a suicide warning label.

In addition to the leap in SSRI antidepressants, prescriptions for the anticonvulsants Topamax and Neurontin rose 56 percent in the same group since 2005, says Navy Times -- drugs the FDA warned last year double suicidal thinking in patients.

In fact, 4,994 troops at Fort Bragg are on antidepressants right now, says the Fayetteville Observer. Six-hundred-sixty-four are on an antipsychotics and "many soldiers take more than one type of medication."

Of course, depression itself is a risk factor for suicide, so it is not always possible to tell if the disease or the drug is at fault.

But many believe the dramatic and tandem rises in suicide rates and psychoactive drug rates are correlated. "Intuitively, it just tells you that there's a connection,"

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