Posts tagged - bigpharma

Had Enough of BigPharma? Here’s More

Posted on: July 03, 2019, in: , , , , , , ,

Scott Gottlieb jumps from top FDA regulator to big bucks with Pfizer

Here we are in the middle of a BigPharma crisis — with people dying of opioid addiction, prices on pharmaceuticals skyrocketing, Congress raking in BigPharma campaign money and one-sixth of the American public taking useless  and dangerous antidepressants — and Scott Gottlieb, who served less than two years as FDA Commissioner and who resigned because he “wanted to spend more time with his family” has, predictably, two months later, passed through the “bigpharma revolving door” and joined Pfizer’s Board of Directors. He’ll now make the really big bucks and help the drugmaker speed new drugs through FDA approvals in the “good old boy” network.

Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democrats running for president, has called for him to resign. How about just making it illegal for the director of a federal regulatory agency to jump ship to a regulated industry or vice-versa? One of the perks of FDA employment, for example, is that drug companies often hire FDA staffers who approve their drugs.

Gottlieb will make a minimum of $335,000 a year if last year’s salaries hold, probably much more for his prize stash of FDA intelligence and inside information. Time to stop this stupidity and corruption! Block the revolving door and vote against anybody who takes big money from BigPharma!

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BigPharma in the Bedroom

Posted on: June 24, 2019, in: , , , ,

Sasin Tipchaia from Pixabay

The FDA has approved another drug to hype up sexual desire. The drug, bremolanotide, is injected before sex and if it becomes a big hit, could make billions for the drug company. But there are reasons to be skeptical, primary among which are that we’ve been down that road before with tragic or really stupid results.

In high school, for example, the big deal among boys was Spanish Fly. Nobody ever knew where to get it, maybe in Tijuana, but supposedly it made girls want to have sex. Evidently it did exist, but was made from the juice of a blister beetle, and worked on men at least, by burning the urethra. But you know, people peed blood and sometimes died, and so Spanish Fly got a bad reputation.

And then there were the so-called “date rape drugs,” dropped into alcoholic drinks. They didn’t make people want sex, but it did render them confused or unconscious so they couldn’t say no. But since rape is a felony, one of the side effects was 15-20 years of hard time in prison for the rapist, and a pretty horrible experience for the victim.

And then came Viagra, approved by the FDA in 1998 so that guys at least could have more fun with a prescription. Some hoped that the quest for rhinoceros horn might be over. But the pills cost $65 each, weren’t covered by insurance, and erections lasting more than four hours could pool blood in the penis and starve it of oxygen leading to – you guessed it – very bad things.

But Viagra didn’t work for the ladies, and so the men in white coats went back to work on the mother lode of drugs — what could be the biggest blockbuster drug in history.

For example, in 2010, the FDA was considering approving something dubbed “female Viagra.” The drug, flibanserin, was originally developed as an antidepressant, but it didn’t work and in fact had depression as a side effect. So with the bright idea to market it as a female aphrodisiac, Boehringer Ingelheim tried to get it approved by the FDA for that purpose. But the FDA said no two times, development stopped, and the drug was sold to Sprout Pharmaceuticals.

Sprout began a marketing campaign painting it in gender-equity colors, sponsoring studies that created “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” as a disease and invented the slogan “Even the Score.” The FDA approved the drug in 2015, and two days later, Sprout sold out to Valeant Pharmaceuticals for a cool billion dollars.

But the drug didn’t do so well, as efficacy was small compared to placebos, cost $400 per month, and had side effects of nausea, dizziness, sleepiness, depression, etc. And while flibanserin must be taken daily, it could not be taken with alcohol, which was a real buzz kill. It sold for a measly $10 million, which in the pharmaceutical game is peanuts. A total flop.

But BigPharma could sense blood in the water, and it went back to the bedroom and came up with the latest miracle aphrodisiac, bremolanotide. Early research shows little difference in effect from a placebo. And the question remains: can an expensive drug make up for something missing in the complexities of human relationships?

Sex should be pleasurable, nature intended it that way to continue the species. And marriage was instituted to protect and care for the next generation. But BigPharma looks at human beings as nothing more than meat bodies, collections of stimulus-response neurons, synapses and chemicals just waiting for the right pharmaceutical magic wand to lift life to higher levels of awareness, creativity and tenderness.

But it doesn’t work that way. Drugs, by their nature, go the other direction. And amping up sexual performance with Viagra, flibanserin or bremolanotide even if they did work, isn’t going to solve some of the biggest difficulties in society today: infidelity, broken marriages, STDs, single parent families and children in foster homes because of parents hooked on opioids or dead of overdoses. BigPharma had a role in all that too, so to expect the latest pill or needle to solve life’s complex difficulties is a bit simple-minded.

 

 

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The Drug Addiction Crisis is Your Fault

Posted on: October 09, 2018, in: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Uncle Sam PixabayBy now, everyone is convinced we are in a drug-addiction crisis, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Such as pharmaceutical companies that invented street drugs to begin with. Bayer once touted heroin for headaches,  Abbott Labs promoted methamphetamine as a remedy for alcoholism, Sandoz invented LSD, Merc invented morphine, distributed cocaine, and invented MDMA, and Purdue convinced doctors to prescribe OxyCodone for pain by assuring them that chances of addiction were very slim. And we can blame the doctors who ignored evidence to the contrary.

We can point the finger at pharmacies that order thousands more opioids than will be needed and fill prescriptions far above what makes sense. Pharmaceutical distributors that ignore huge orders for opioids from small pharmacies, and pressure legislators to pass bills that make the DEA impotent to enforce existing rules. DEA and FDA executives who jump ship to work for big pharma at huge increases in salary so they can help build strategies to circumvent legal restrictions on their activities. Psychiatrists and physicians who take money from big pharma and go on to promote medication assisted treatment not for detoxification, but as a permanent opioid-fueled future which will benefit pharmaceutical firms and their stockholders, who put addicts on naloxone and methadone which is much harder to detox than heroin, but has the advantage of diverting money from the street drug dealer to the pharmaceutical drug dealers and their investors. The pharmaceutical companies who invent drugs to block addiction to all but their own drugs, that block death on the street and then – aping the strategies of the most venial drug pushers – raise the prices multiple times, crying that “shortages exist, you’d better hurry!” Correctional institutions who embrace medication assisted treatment to medicate inmates instead of using incarceration as a period of drying out for later life, and did anyone mention investors in big pharma stocks because wow, riches await from more and more addicts using more and more pharmaceuticals?

And there’s plenty of blame for all those judges, doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists who help close the gap between prescription drugs and street drugs. For the military exhuming the abominations of MKULTRA by experimenting on those with PTSD, trying a little of this LSD, a little of that marijuana, some wires in the brain – who knows? We might find a way to create a new and better Manchurian Candidate, make robots out of soldiers, make mass murderers out of troubled spirits. And we can blame “non-profit organizations” like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who are spurring interest in using drugs to swap neuroses for outright insanity, organizations who secretly channel millions to legalize marijuana, to companies like Coca-Cola which once contained cocaine for a little boost, which is now going back to its roots, putting marijuana in its product. We can blame the legislators who get swept along in this tsunami of cash and influence, passing bills and listening to drug pushers in suits who convince them that it’s all good, and “here’s a little donation for your next campaign.” Psychiatrists who contend that everyone is basically nuts, so a little drug, a little electroshock, a little wire in the brain certainly couldn’t make you any worse…

But for all the blame to hand around, what about you? Do you know people who have their kids on speed (called ADHD medication by the shrinks)? Do you have a family member who is using marijuana or drinking too much? Are you on an anti-depressant because you feel bad sometimes? Do you get drunk on the weekends to unwind, or smoke a little weed, because after all, it’s legal now? Is your aged mother on “happy pills” so she won’t complain so much about the food, the loss of independence, the minimum-wage helpers telling her what to do in her assisted living facility? Do you nod sympathetically at people who start every conversation with “I’m ADHD” or “Since I was diagnosed with PTSD,” or “I’ve been depressed for some time now.”?

So what are you doing to help make things better? Is it all too big for you? Are you just one person? Are you in agreement with those who try to make addicts poor victims of the system? Who say that addiction, mental illness, criminality is all just a brain disease, not a choice, that we are all just victims of circumstance? We should all just go down the drain together and let the greatest country the world has ever seen evaporate like bong smoke.

Well, grow a pair why don’t you? Do something useful. Someone says. “I’ve got ADHD,” you can retort, “Who gave you that idea?” Someone says “I’m on an anti-depressant,” you can reply “What can you do to handle the situation that’s depressing you?” Someone says “marijuana is legal now, so it’s fine,” you say “So now the government has your best interests – and the taxes on weed – at heart?” Be blunt, invalidate those stupid ideas and self-victimization. Stigma is a good thing – it might help deter a kid thinking about drinking, or using meth or shooting up. Might keep him or her from ending up as a shit-stained twist of laundry in an alley somewhere, or a numbed-out methadone or pharmaceutical junkie for the rest of his or her life.

Do you vote a straight Democratic or Republican ticket, because you’re too lazy to read the voter guide? Or just not vote because there’s nothing you can do about it? Find out who’s taking money from big pharma, from the American Psychiatric Association, from the American Medical Association, the PACs and special interests and vote against them. Vote for those you think might not be in step with a stupider society.

Support religion and spiritual awareness and don’t fall for the efforts to pit one group against another. Support groups that help families, that repair marriages, that support kids and adoption and good education and a prosperous future – and beware of the “everybody-will-agree-with-this” PR and feel-good empty words of the campaign trail. Evaluate the politically correct movements to see if they lead to a better life and a better society, if they do, join, and if they don’t, oppose them even if you get hammered for it on social media.

There’s an old statement to the effect that “You get the government you deserve.” Look at what we’re getting and take some responsibility for it. It’s up to you not to your neighbors or your representatives. The left, the right, the middle, all political stripes have their own agendas, their own railroad tracks leading to their own little utopias. Do you want to travel with them? They make it easy, and they will appeal to your stupider self that thinks life consists of food, sleep and sex, and getting high can handle the rest, all funded by insurance, by taxes on “the fat-cat one percent” or the tiny fines on multi-billion-dollar drug firms.

So what can you do? Join up with effective organizations fighting stupidity and drug-induced dreaming not doing. Check out Foundation for a Drug-Free World, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and other effective anti-drug and anti-stupidity groups. Sure, the organizations I mentioned above are related to the Church of Scientology, and all the crap you’ve heard about Scientology? It’s a measure of just how effective these organizations are in enlightening people on the drug and psychiatric agenda. Those lies and smears in the media? A badge of honor. If they were ineffective, they would be ignored by the psych-drug-media cartel, or perhaps even supported by it.

OK, so this mess is not all your fault, but if everyone woke up and went into action, this drugged-up country could reboot and get back to some basic principles. There are 21 of those principles, and here’s a link to them. Good luck.

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Jails and Prisons Encouraged to Keep Inmates on Pharmaceuticals

Posted on: May 30, 2018, in: , , , ,

Is medication-assisted-treatment a good idea in dealing with opioid addicts in jails and prisons? The use of buprenorphine is said to be more compassionate, because “there’s no need for someone to suffer through withdrawal,” that “inmates can die from dehydration and loss of electrolytes,” and thus substituting buprenorphine for the addict’s usual opioid is the best solution.

April, a former drug abuse and detox worker who does not wish to be named, is blunt in her appraisal: “That’s stupid,” She said. “Alcoholics are more likely to die from withdrawal than opioid addicts. Opioid addicts get diarrhea during withdrawal, so they need water and electrolytes, which can be easily handled by staff. They don’t need pharmacists, trained doctors and buprenorphine, which is just another opioid.”

She said that some addicts go to jail specifically to dry out.

And the articles touting the benefits of medication assisted treatment on inmates are a bit fuzzy regarding outcomes. Will the medication be used to gradually taper off the opioid and then off the buprenorphine, or will the inmate be maintained on the buprenorphine after release, or even for the rest of his or her life?

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Bad News for BigPharma

Posted on: May 23, 2018, in: , , ,

Pitchman PixabayAccording to Six Trends in ePharma Marketing, Embracing Digital Transformation in the Pharma and Healthcare Sectors, A Marketer’s Guide, some trends have developed which are alarming BigPharma but may spell relief to consumers. Among those are:

  1. Direct-to-Consumer television ads have lost their effectiveness and support. The American Medical Association supports a ban on prescription drug direct-to-consumer ads, and over a span of two years, consumers who asked their doctor about a drug advertised on TV dropped from 21 percent in 2015 to only 7 percent in 2017.
  2. Physicians have lost trust in BigPharma. According to ZS, the number of physicians who will meet with at least 70 percent of pharma sales reps who request a meeting has dropped to 44 percent, down from 80 percent in 2008.  And a Deloitte Consulting study revealed that 75 percent of physicians don’t entirely trust information that comes from BigPharma. In addition one-third of consumers blame doctors for the opioid crisis, so physicians are more wary of prescribing.
  3. Restrictions on social media advertising has forced BigPharma to resort to stealth advertising about wellness and conditions that only incidentally relate to a specific product. As STAT’s Rebecca Robbins explained, unbranded ads are “a stealthy and lightly regulated form of drug marketing focused on educating the public about a health condition — which the pharma company just happens to sell a product to treat.” In one month, for example, Merck spent an estimated $9.9m on ads on HPV and shingles, while Mylan spent an estimated $8.5m on ads about severe allergic reactions. Merck manufactures HPV and shingles vaccines, and Mylan manufactures the EpiPen, for severe allergic reactions.
  4. Drug-pricing controversies have put additional scrutiny on BigPharma from the public, government regulators and physicians.

However, BigPharma is busy exploiting some loopholes including:

  1. According to one survey, millennials are “by far the most receptive to pharmaceutical marketing” of any generation.
  2. Aggressive marketers can exploit electronic health records to influence providers through decision-support systems.
  3. And BigPharma’s pressure on physicians is relentless. According to ZS, each of the 26,000 prescribers contacted most frequently by pharma companies receive around 2,800 contacts per year from the pharmaceutical industry.

 

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Top NIMH Officials Admit Mental Health ‘Broken’

Posted on: May 21, 2018, in: , , , ,

In “My Adventures With the Trip Doctors” (May 15 New York Times Magazine,) author Michael Pollan drops a bomb – a simple idea that has been denied by the psychiatric, pharmaceutical and mental health communities for years: mainly that psychiatry and psychopharmaceuticals don’t work, and in fact can create and exacerbate insanity, dependence and suicide.

Pollan, while basically extolling the miracles of psychedelic drugs for everything from religious transformation to the healing of mental illness says this in passing:

“Such a new approach couldn’t come at a better time for a field that is ‘broken,’ as Tom Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health until 2015, told me bluntly. Rates of depression (now the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the W.H.O.) and suicide are climbing; addictive behavior is rampant. Little has changed, meanwhile, in psychopharmacology since the introduction of SSRI antidepressants in the late 1980s. This may explain why prominent figures in the psychiatric establishment are voicing support for psychedelic research.”

This echoes a statement by Joshua Gordon,  the current head of the NIMH who took office last July. In an interview with the Washington Post, Gordon said “All these off-label uses of any of our psychiatric medications result from desperation on the part of both patients and physicians who don’t know what else to do for their patients . . . The evidence for any of them is nonexistent or minimal. But we don’t have good alternatives. We don’t have evidence-based treatments that really do the job. So that means that people turn to whatever can help them in a symptomatic way . . . It’s a problem that’s borne out of the fact that our treatments just don’t work, or don’t work well, for a substantial fraction of our patients.”

Recent studies indicate that about one in six Americans take psychiatric drugs, and today mental health is a $200 billion industry. With top officials at the NIMH admitting failure, it’s time to reevaluate our commitment to these drugs and those that prescribe them, and to carefully scrutinize measures to legalize psychedelics as “the next great thing.” Psychiatry is desperate for answers and psychedelics could be just the next in a long line of desperate measures that will create the next round of havoc.

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Today’s Traveling Patent-Medicine Show

Posted on: May 14, 2018, in: , , , , , ,

heroin bottleA hundred years ago, traveling shows peddled patent medicine, sometimes one step ahead of the authorities. Ingredients included opium, alcohol, laudanum, radium, and other illicit substances. Tapeworm larvae were sometimes suspended in weight-reduction remedies.

By the time the authorities closed in, the wagon, the salesman and his wares were gone, leaving the purchaser or the local doctor to deal with the side effects of the medication: addiction, parasite infestation, cancer or worse. In 2018, we may look at such abuses as a long-gone product of unbridled greed and horrific ignorance, that could not exist in our highly connected and well-educated society of today.

However, indications exist of a modern-day version of yesteryear’s patent medicine traveling show.

During the Civil War, for example, morphine was used as a painkiller for wounds. But many patients given the drug for pain became addicted. To counter the addictive nature of morphine, heroin – supposedly less addictive – was developed by Bayer and was widely adopted for pain reduction. Problem solved – at least until the addictive properties of heroin were manifest.

In 1947, Methadone – an opioid developed by Germany’s IG Farben in the 1930s – was approved for use in the United States to get addicts off heroin. But while the half-life of morphine is one to five hours, and heroin’s half-life is 30 minutes, Methadone’s half-life is 24 hours to 50 hours or more. That makes it useful for maintenance, as addicts can receive a dose in a registered facility once per day, but it makes getting completely off the drug very difficult.

For example, April, a former heroin counselor who does not wish to be identified, said that “in the 1970s, heroin addicts were being channeled to methadone maintenance as a way of stably getting off heroin. The heroin addict would go to a Methadone maintenance program that was fully funded at no out-of-pocket expense to the addict, and receive a daily dose of Methadone.”

Methadone, said April, did not provide the high but did eliminate the physical withdrawal symptoms, and allowed the addict a more stable life. They didn’t have to steal, they could hold a job, and have a somewhat manageable life as long as they went for their daily doses of Methadone. But there was a cost.

“Methadone had a much harder and longer detox period, so if the addict ever wanted to come off maintenance, they were in for a very uncomfortable ride.” Because of that, April’s non-profit detox unit couldn’t handle Methadone detox. “The street guidance,” she said, “was to spend three weeks or so to transition from Methadone back to heroin, and then check into heroin detox and in 3-10 days you were through withdrawal and could go back to the ‘manageable life’ you’d established while on Methadone maintenance.” At that point the addict was drug free but beset with cravings which had been kept at a distance with Methadone.

So why would an addict want to come off Methadone maintenance? “They have to show up at a clinic seven days a week,” said April, “line up with other junkies for their dose of the drug, so they are still a slave to the drug. They became a functional Methadone addict rather than a dysfunctional heroin addict.”

Methadone, as does any opioid, also fosters physical dependence, and long-term use can cause damage to nerves, liver and brain. Perhaps maintenance is an acceptable risk compared to the dangers of dirty needles, overdoses in alleys and robbing liquor stores or engaging in prostitution to secure the hundreds of dollars a day necessary to feed a raging drug habit, but nonetheless it is a far cry from being free of drug slavery.

Because of the dangers of addiction, physicians were reluctant to prescribe opioids for pain, except in the most severe cases. But in 1996, Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin as a timed-release supposedly non-addictive opioid pain reliever. Reassured, physicians began prescribing it.

Contrary to Purdue’s assertion of non-addiction, the FDA recently said OxyContin is more addictive than morphine. So once again, a drug solution becomes the next problem, as evidenced by the “opioid crisis” spurred by OxyContin and other pharmaceuticals. In 2016, according to the New York Times, 64,000 people were killed by drug overdoses of prescription opioid painkillers and heroin. And drug addiction costs the country $78.5 billion a year in healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice.

This problem/solution/problem theme continues today under the title of Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) which substitutes a legally prescribed drug such as Methadone, Naltrexone or Buprenorphine for an illegal street drug. MAT is spreading across the country as a solution to the opioid crisis, embraced by cities, counties, states and even prison systems.

One hundred years ago, purveyors of dangerous patent medicine could slip away undetected. But today – with our electronic medical records and coordinated law enforcement systems – we might expect immediate action against such dangers. But OxyContin and its role in the opioid crisis took two decades to spot, with disastrous consequences.

For that reason, prescribing pharmaceuticals as solutions for addiction should be looked at with some skepticism. This is even more important as a rush of breathless reports appear in popular media about the benefits of LSD, ecstasy and marijuana as solutions for depression, PTSD, and more.

By the time we detect the harmful nature of these so-called remedies, the patent-medicine salesman has stuffed the cash into his pockets and moved on, while communities are left to pick up the pieces.

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The Addiction Scam

Posted on: January 31, 2018, in: , , , , ,

One of the biggest hurdles psychiatry has to overcome is people that think they are sane. Now psychiatrists are taught that no one is sane, that everyone is psychotic, neurotic or “underserved.” Several techniques have been developed by the head shrinkers to made people question their own sanity and stability. First,, they medicalized normal behavior such as nail biting, checking to see if the front door is locked more than once when you leave the house, worrying about things, not worrying about things, being too introverted and inactive, being too extroverted and active, and so on, to the tune of more than 300 diagnoses in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is what the shrinks use to bill insurance for literally everything under the sun.

One of the biggest convincers of people that they are nuts, are “direct to consumer” drug ads. Trouble sleeping? Restless legs? Erectile dysfuntion? Feeling low? Ask your doctor if expensive drugging is right for you!

Well, the U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allow “direct to consumer” ads for prescription drugs. Why? Well, it boosted drug sales by 30 percent or more when you and I went to our doctors and asked for some prescription we saw on TV.

Another convincer is to push the lie that everyone is addicted to something. You may not be a heroin addict shooting up in an alley, but you too, Mr. and Mrs. America, are addicted, and here is a laundry list of addictions basically pulled out of someone’s nether orifice to use in marketing drugs and psychiatric services. Oh and just in case you seek help for that “addiction” be warned that under certain circumstances, you can be held against your will in a facility for up to 72 hours. For those addicted to freedom, that could be a bummer.

OK, so here is the latest batch of “addictions.”

Cell phones
Gaming
Lust
Pornography
Energy Drinks
Wealth Culture
Shopping
Martial Arts are Said to Help with Gaming Addiction, but then there’s:
Exercise

Are you outraged? According to some idiots, outrage is also an addiction so before you find yourself in the loony bin for a 72-hour involuntary hold, better curb that outrage and take a pill.

So there are certain things, like opioid drugs, that cause cravings and physical distress if they are discontinued. The psychs are busily trying to convince everyone that shooting up in an alley is a mental disease that is incurable and must be maintained by pharmaceuticals for the rest of the addict’s life. They don’t think there is such a thing as willpower and try to get drug-free recovery categorized as quackery. So that 72-hour hold for shopping addiction can mean a lifetime on some psychiatric drug. Welcome to the crazy house.

 

 

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The Medicalizing of America

Posted on: January 19, 2018, in: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

I’ve been plowing through news feeds for a few months now, and the issues I’m interested in – which focus on the spreading influence of BigPharma, psychiatry and the medication of America – have sort of settled into a number of issues. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1.   The marketing of psychedelic drugs to cure most everything from depression to crime. The Military is pushing it, as well as anonymous donations to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). LSD is good for you, magic mushrooms are a spiritual tonic, and taking psychedelic trips will make you a good person, empty the prisons, and you can tune in, turn on and drop out like last time.

2.   Along with number 1 above, is the first official admission that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos and have wildly variant effects on individuals. One in six Americans takes an antidepressant, and about $150 billion is spent per year on such medications and related costs. So BigPharma will take a huge hit unless alternatives such as psychedelics and electroceuticals take hold.

3.   Electroceuticals, the implanting of electrical devices into the brain to deliver electricity or drugs, are back – back from MKULTRA where they were covertly tested on unwitting subjects along with other stuff like LSD as a way to brainwash people and control their behavior. This time it’s out in the open – credit Wikileaks and the revelations about NSA spying for that – under cover of “this will help you.” Might be of some use in Parkinson’s disease, but now the claims are that it cures everything, and BigPharma, like GlaxoSmithKline and the military are funding research in microshocking brains directly or through magnetic stimulation. Electroshock of the type seen in “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” is also back, with the FDA recently lowering the risk factor so children can have their brains zapped too.

4.   Legalization of marijuana began with medical marijuana and transitioned to what we all knew it was for — to get high. Liberal billionaires such as George Soros funded state legalization efforts even though Democrats have mostly stayed silent and let the potheads carry the ball. Liberals want the tax money for social programs, conservatives want the tax money for war, and so opposition has been wimpy. With THC at over 30 percent – up from 3 percent in the 1960s – marijuana induced paranoia and mental illness is on the rise which will be a windfall for the shrinks. Meanwhile, BigPharma is gearing up to produce marijuana, LSD, and so forth. They’ll drop the prices to squeeze out the competition, then control the formerly-illicit-but-now-FDA-approved drug market.

5.   On the tail of marijuana legalization are other measures to mainstream hard drugs through “harm reduction” “decriminalization” and outright legalization. Turns out marijuana was a “gateway drug” and the marketing always starts with “The war on drugs has been lost,” which is a lie. Just turns out that drugs are big money and government wants in on the trillion-dollar BigPharma economy. If it really heats up like it did in Colombia, BigPharma and lots of Pablo Escobar lookalikes will end up running the United States. Some states are going to use the tax money for drug treatment programs which leads to number 6:

6.   “Medication Assisted Treatment” is now being heavily promoted as a treatment for addictions of all kinds: opioid addiction, sex addiction, videogame addiction, food addiction, ad infinitum. And while most of these addictions don’t exist, the psychs say addiction is a chronic brain disease and there’s no cure so addicts must be put on other drugs like methodone, which are paid for by medical insurance, and maintained on those drugs for the rest of their lives. So BigPharma, — which controls the FDA and will soon control Congress, the POTUS, political PACs and so on – will control the solution to the problem of addiction.

7.   The polarization of politics, fights of religious freedom vs. gender equity, and other nasty infighting will most likely be resolved when the parties stirring it up are uncovered, but in the meantime, the stirring up is most likely a distraction to pull attention away from the medicalizing of America and the growth of BigPharma, the psychs and the economic systems fueling it.

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What BigPharma Learned from Pablo Escobar

Posted on: January 08, 2018, in: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pablo Escobar By Colombian National Police - Colombia National Registry; Colombian National Police, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Pablo Escobar By Colombian National Police – Colombia National Registry; Colombian National Police, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Suppose you were Pablo Escobar, the Columbian drug lord, back in the 1970s and wanted to increase cocaine’s market share. How would you proceed, what strategies would you use, what kind of activities would fill up your “to do” list?

While the coca leaf had been used for centuries by Native Americans of the Andes as a stimulant that wasn’t really a very lucrative market, so expanding into a rich country was a bright idea.

Item 1 On Pablo Escobar’s To Do List: Get Rich Americans Using Cocaine. Well, back in the 1800s Albert Niemann – a German chemist who also invented mustard gas – isolated the really strong stuff from the coca leaf and cocaine was used for surgery and to treat morphine addiction. It was the medication assisted treatment of the day: treat an addiction with another addictive drug. So what followed were wild claims of cocaine’s curative powers, a pick me up, added to all kinds of patent medicine and a drink called Coca Cola after the Coca plant. By the mid 1900s, suspicion grew that cocaine was addictive, so it was made illegal, and it was not readily available, so use dwindled.

Then  in 1974 the New York Times Magazine touted cocaine as a way to get high without needles or addiction, a 1975 book on cocaine said that it was a good drug, and Newsweek Magazine ran illustrations  of stylish men and women doing lines of cocaine, comparing it to champagne and caviar. Well, who wouldn’t love some cocaine?

And here we go back to Pablo Escobar’s “to do” list. Suddenly cocaine was “stylish and non-addictive” and so a demand was created, the warnings from the past were ignored, and demand exploded.

Item 2 on Pablo Escobar’s To Do List: Make $50 Billion. Pablo Escobar, who had been a minor criminal, now entered the smuggling business, expanded production and transshipping points, began paying off or murdering judges, police officers and politicians, and supply met demand and demand just kept growing. Turns out that cocaine is highly addictive, contrary to what was said in the New York Times Magazine, so everyone craved the next line of the drug. As a result, Escobar became one of the richest men in the world, worth an estimated $56 billion by 1990 at today’s exchange rate.

Item 3 on Pablo Escobar’s To Do List: Take Over the Country. In 1982, Escobar – who as part of his public relations campaign, gave money and soccer fields to the poor as well as greasing the palms of officials – was elected an alternate member of the Chamber of Representatives of Colombia , and became one of the most powerful men in the world. He controlled many public officials, ordered assassinations, sponsored terrorist attacks, paid townspeople for being lookouts and gave bonuses for killing police officers. He and his Medellin Cartel were unstoppable for a time.

Pablo Escobar’s Mistakes: However, Escobar made some mistakes, including causing the violent deaths of 20,000 people, and thousands more from addiction and crime, and he himself was murdered at age 44.

BigPharma

Now let’s take up BigPharma, those giant pharmaceutical companies around the world. First, BigPharma invented the street drugs we’ve been trying to just say no to. Big pharma created heroin (Bayer) and LSD (Sandoz). Merck pioneered the commercial manufacture of morphine, distributed cocaine and invented MDMA. OxyContin which started the latest “opioid crisis” was created by German scientists and pushed into society by Purdue Pharma. Crystal meth was first created in Japan and after World War II Abbott Laboratories won FDA approval for meth as a remedy for alcoholism and weight gain. Fentanyl, responsible for the majority of opioid overdose deaths, was invented by Janssen Pharmaceutica.

Now one shouldn’t suppose that BigPharma, being corporations and all, and under the regulation of the Food and Drug Administration and supervised by doctors and psychiatrists do anything as crude as Pablo Escobar. No sir, they are legit, they’ve learned a lot from Escobar, as you can see from what follows.

Item 1 on BigPharma’s ToDo List: Get All Americans on Drugs, Rich and Poor.

OK, so now BigPharma has all those addictive drugs just sitting there on the shelves, and so something has to change. So here comes the “To do” list again, this time from BigPharma. And while Escobar was just a two-bit criminal from a small undeveloped country, BigPharma is big, well-heeled, corporate, and from developed countries.

So here goes: First, opioids were being used mostly for severe pain, like terminal cancer, and doctors are very worried about prescribing opioids because of the danger of addiction. So as a result a lot of people are going around without drugs, and that’s got to change. So in 1996 Purdue Pharma ran some ads about a new opioid called Oxycontin that said it was a timed release opioid and was not habit forming, so doctors could feel good about prescribing it for pain. Well, the dam broke and doctors started prescribing it like mad for everything that might be a bit painful. Contrary to what Purdue said, people got addicted, and like all opioids they needed more and more to stay high until they overdosed and died. If their prescriptions ran out they went to the street for something else, like heroin. But all these overdose deaths looked bad and also got rid of users, so BigPharma invented drugs like Narcan and Evzio that block opioids and bring the overdoser back to life.

The psychs played a part in all this by categorizing addiction as a “chronic brain disease” so once you have it, you need treatment the rest of your life. So once you are brought back to life, you are put on other BigPharma drugs in something called “medication assisted treatment” or MAT. As you may recall, cocaine was originally used to treat morphine addiction, so BigPharma took this idea and updated it. Some of the drugs used for MAT include methodone, Buprenorphine  and Naltrexone.

So the more people that die of opioid overdoses, the more everyone wants “treatment rather than prison” which means put the addict on BigPharma’s MAT drugs for the rest off their lives, and that just kicks up the profits, investors clean up,  and everyone that counts is very happy.

The next thing is to use drugs that make you crazy – like LSD and Marijuana – which now has around 35 percent THC instead of the 3 percent it had back in the hippie 1960s – to treat mental illness. Then when you go crazy, you need antidepressants and antipsychotics, as long as we ignore the fact that the drugs you’re being treated with can make you paranoid, make you hallucinate, and make you go nuts and shoot lots of people in schools, churches and Las Vegas music concerts. But I digress.

Lots of states are now legalizing marijuana. George Soros has spent $80 million bankrolling campaigns to legalize weed, and guess what solution is prescribed for cannabis-induced psychosis? (It does cause psychosis in long-term users ) Psychiatric medications of course! And now Washington State and Colorado who were the first states to legalize weed, are at the top of the list in states needing mental health help for all the weed-smoking wackos going bonkers.

Remember the New York Times Magazine articles all aglow about the benefits and non-addiction of cocaine, the happy articles of how cocaine was very fashionable and like champagne and caviar? Well, BigPharma is taking a leaf from Pablo Escobar’s book, or the media are doing it on their own because they are dopers themselves, here are some of the things that are being promoted as good for you:

Psychedelics are now touted as cures for PTSD, depression, addiction, anxiety, eating disorders, smoking, OCD and crime, among others. Wow, what a miracle drug as long as you forget the 1960s. If you can remember the 60s you weren’t there except maybe for the flashbacks. And the military (remember MKULTRA and LSD testing?) is touting ecstasy as a PTSD treatment. It’s miraculous!  And then when you go really crazy on LSD or ecstasy, what’s the treatment? Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, anti-psychotic drugs. And with government healthcare it’s not just the rich that get hooked and fucked up, it’s EVERYBODY!

OK, so no matter which addictive or psychosis-inducing drug you get hooked on, no matter if you got hooked on the street or in the doctor’s office, there’s another drug that’s legal that you can get with a prescription that is a “cure” for the drug you took before. And if the first three anti-depressants don’t work, there’s another one that might, and if that doesn’t work there’s always electroshock to turn you into a compliant vegetable so you can be given many many drugs by the nice attendants.

As a result, one in six Americans are on psych medications, from antidepressants to ADHD speed, to every kind of shit under the sun. The FDA — a government agency supposed to be the watchdog– accepts payments from drug companies to fast-track approvals, and the head of the FDA was once a consultant to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. And it’s all completely legal, even though half a million people have died of opioid overdoses from 2000-2015! So compared to BigPharma, Pablo Escobar was in kindergarten! So as a people, we’re circling the drain of addiction and a drugged existence, and BigPharma and the headshrinkers that smooth the takeover are making a killing.

Item 2 on BigPharma’s To Do List: Make a LOT of Money: OK, so while Pablo Escobar made a measley $50 billion, BigPharma makes in excess of $1 trillion with a T and half of that comes from the US and Canada.  Now some of that is for real drugs that do good, like asthma medication, heart pills, insulin, and so forth. But  13% of the US population is on antidepressants and 13 percent on prescription opioids, and some 25 million Americans are addicted to illegal drugs.    And with the psychs pushing the idea that everybody is crazy and “underserved,” and with states legalizing weed and Oregon decriminalizing hard drugs and pushing to legalize psychedelics, expect those numbers to grow pretty fast.

Depressed? Sad? Crazy? Too Happy? Impulsive? Can’t sit in a school desk for 8 hours? Legs restless? Have a child that doesn’t mind? Stressed? (Everyone is you know), Can’t read? Trouble in the bedroom? Like computer games too much? Into drugs? Well, if you answered yes to any of these, you are in luck! You or your kid is nuts and needs some drugs and BigPharma has them, and your insurance will probably pay for them. Meanwhile, BigPharma is pulling in a trillion in revenues which is much better than Pablo’s crew, but BigPharma CEOs are not making much, what with the overhead and all. Compensation of the top 20 ranges from a paltry $13 million to only $41 million per year, nowhere near Pablo’s $30 billion per year in personal income, but you know, BigPharma has to keep a low profile, pay off investors and such, while Pablo just shot anybody who got in the way.

OK, so here are the key points: Use one drug to get off another drug, legalize and then flood the country with drugs, hype the opioid crisis, increase funding for “treatment” which is just more drugs, and let users keep using through something called “harm reduction,” in which the government provides clean needles, safe spaces to shoot up, BigPharma provides clean heroin, or meth, or ecstasy, or whatever, and there’s plenty of Narcan and Evzio around to treat overdoses, and those drugs are all free to users. You try to get users into treatment, or course, with BigPharma MAT drugs and everything is rosy. Pablo would approve.

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