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Drug racket

With COX-2 decision, no longer any doubt about FDA corruption and U.S. drug racket

Friday, February 18, 2005
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: drug racket, Vioxx, the FDA


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Following the death of as many as 60,000 Americans from COX-2 inhibitors (source: British Medical Journal, author Dr. David Graham, FDA drug safety researcher), an FDA advisory panel has now voted to allow the drugs to return to the market with full FDA safety approval. The fact that a single COX-2 drug has reportedly killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War is apparently not sufficient for the FDA to characterize it as unsafe.

With this decision, a "safety approval" by the FDA has now become meaningless. If the agency can put its stamp of public safety approval on a drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans and that was removed from the market by its own manufacturer following the revelation of studies showing alarming increases in heart attack risk, then what, pray tell, could possibly be the FDA's definition of a dangerous drug?

For the FDA to consider a drug dangerous, it apparently has to kill more than 60,000 Americans. I'm curious what threshold must be reached before the FDA actually does its job and seeks to protect the U.S. public. Do 250,000 people have to die before the FDA calls a drug unsafe? 500,000 people? How about a million people?

There can no longer be any doubt whatsoever about the FDA's true purpose. Regardless of what the agency publicly states, when it comes time to make key decisions about the safety of U.S. consumers, the FDA will side with drug companies every time. We've seen it time and time again: with the FDA's reluctance to pull obviously dangerous drugs off the market in a timely fashion (Rezulin, for example), with the FDA's attempts to silence its own drug safety scientists (censorship of Dr. David Graham, for example), and with the FDA's collusion with drug companies in suppressing clinical trials and other forms of evidence that raise safety questions about prescription drugs. Corruption runs deep at the FDA, it seems.

This decision with Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors was a defining moment for the U.S. Fraud and Drug Administration. It was a moment where the agency could have sided with public safety and held fast to a position of responsibility and ethics. Instead, it chose to favor drug company profits and put its stamp of approval on a class of drugs that is arguably the most deadly drugs ever to hit the open market.

A sane, ethical FDA would have not only banned COX-2 inhibitors outright, it would have put an end to direct-to-consumer advertising that ultimately led to the over-hyping and over-prescribing of these painkillers in the first place. Most people taking COX-2 inhibitors don't even need them. They would be better off with simple over-the-counter painkillers or, better yet, natural health treatments like nutrition, herbal remedies and supplements that work far better than prescription drugs for stopping arthritis pain (and without all the negative side effects). Astaxanthin supplements, for one, greatly ease arthritis pain. So do whole food concentrates made from cherries, blackberries and other fruits. There are dozens of other natural health strategies that ease pain as well.

To pull off this public charade of a serious meeting about COX-2 inhibitors, meeting organizers paraded a line of pain victims in front of FDA panelists and got them to beg for the availability of COX-2 inhibitors. The implied message was, "If we can't have Vioxx, we'll suffer!" What this faulty argument fails to mention is the whole universe of alternative treatments, healing foods and natural health therapies that end arthritis pain at least as well as prescription drugs. Nowhere was there a discussion of other choices these patients might make to treat their pain. Instead, it was a fool's choice: Vioxx or nothing.

And thus the whole FDA panel meeting was a sham. It was contrived from the start and designed to do one thing: to give the panel justification to reinstate Vioxx and avoid banning COX-2 inhibitors as a class of drugs. This, in turn, would dramatically boost stock prices of drug companies and keep the drug profit machine churning away for years to come. (I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of the people on the FDA advisory panel, by the way, own stock in the very drug companies impacted by this decision.)

It was brilliant theater, but bad medicine. And with this decision, whatever credibility the FDA thought it had remaining has now evaporated. The agency is suddenly the laughing stock of the world. It has taken what many consider to be the most dangerous class of prescription drugs ever introduced and rubber stamped the whole class with the label of "FDA approved."

The very label of "FDA approved" is now synonymous with "Poison." It sort of makes you wonder about all the other drugs the agency has approved, doesn't it? The agency sure has a funny way of defining "safe."

And if you, like many Americans, were holding out in the hopes that the FDA would, for once, do the right thing and protect the American public, you now realize that the agency is so blatantly corrupt that only radical, wholesale reform will ever restore any sense of credibility.

There is an abundance of evidence available right now, published in peer-reviewed medical journals like the British Medical Journal, showing COX-2 inhibitors to be deadly drugs. That's not to mention the internal drug company memos and emails leaked to the press that directly acknowledge the dangers of these drugs. No reasonable person can argue that these drugs are not dangerous. Yet the FDA will no doubt claim there's not enough evidence to show COX-2 inhibitors are dangerous enough to ban them.

I find this fascinating. When the FDA is attacking herbs and nutritional supplements, they will claim there's not enough evidence to prove they are safe. But when it comes to prescription drugs, the agency says there's not enough evidence to prove they're dangerous. All drugs approved by the FDA, it seems, are deemed safe until proven deadly. And even when proven deadly, they apparently aren't deadly enough to warrant banning them.

The FDA is now so clearly the regulatory puppet of Big Pharma that it has proven itself unable to reform from within. It's time for the U.S. public and its legislative representatives to revoke the power of authority over drug safety that has been granted to the FDA in monopoly fashion. It's time to put the power of drug safety into the hands of people who actually care about safety, not those who benefit from drug sales. And it's time to end the oppressive, Dark Ages reign of the U.S. Fraud and Drug Administration which is not only complicit in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Americans, but which seems determined to continue its campaign of power and corruption, no matter what the cost in the American lives.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe (PublicCitizen.org) was right all along. I say we team Dr. Wolfe with Dr. Graham and let them run the FDA. They can start by firing all the bureaucrats that landed us in this drug safety mess in the first place.


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About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

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