Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The bill aims to accomplish several things:
1) Allow the FDA to fine drug companies that fail to conduct post-approval safety studies.
2) Allow the FDA to ban advertising of new drugs for two years after their initial approval.
3) Allow the FDA to review the safety of newly approved drugs 18 months after approval, and then again at 36 months (three years).
4) Raise the amount of money paid to the FDA by drug companies for the review and approval of their drugs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 A survey of 997 FDA scientists revealed that forty percent feared "retaliation" for voicing safety concerns over prescription drugs in public. Over one-third of the scientists didn't even feel safe expressing safety concerns inside the agency, behind closed doors!
Intimidation and censorship have been well documented at the FDA, and this survey adds further weight to the evidence that the FDA has been utterly co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry and now serves Big Pharma's commercial interests rather than anything resembling a commitment to honest science or public safety. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Just because this new Senate bill would "allow" the FDA to fine drug companies for failing to conduct follow-up safety studies doesn't mean the FDA will actually do so. Much of the language in this bill assumes the FDA actually desires to regulate drug companies and protect the American public. Yet past behavior by the agency has proven the FDA has very little interest in protecting the public. Thus, any "optional" language in the bill may ultimately be useless. A good bill would require the FDA to take specific actions, levy certain fines, and oversee the necessary safety studies. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Overall, the FDA’s off-label use rules make a complete mockery of the drug safety approval process in the United States, and they demonstrate how safety approval is really just a rubber-stamping exercise that allows the most profitable and influential corporations in America to push their products onto people who not only don't need them, but who are very likely to be harmed by them.
It also makes a mockery of conventional medicine's criticism of natural therapy. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Genuine hoodia has a wide safety margin, especially compared to pharmaceuticals. It's a succulent, not a drug, and if you've ever chewed on various cacti (I have), you already know that they taste terrible but certainly don't make you sick. There may be exceptions found in particularly poisonous succulents, but hoodia certainly isn't one of them. Remember: The San tribesmen have chewed on this for eons. Indigenous use of herbs is actually a good indication of long-term safety, despite the frustrating fact that conventional medicine ignores all such cultural evidence.
Do I recommend hoodia? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Through its abandonment of public safety and scientific integrity, the FDA has now become the single greatest threat to the health and safety of the American people, dwarfing any threat posed by terrorists.
The FDA's nuclear bomb
Imagine a nuclear bomb detonating over Seattle, Washington. A hundred thousand citizens might be instantly killed, and two million (or more) could be seriously injured from the fallout. As horrific as that image may seem, this is what happens in America every single year from prescription drugs under the watch of the FDA. |
| Over one-third of the scientists didn't even feel safe expressing safety concerns inside the agency, behind closed doors!
Intimidation and censorship have been well documented at the FDA, and this survey adds further weight to the evidence that the FDA has been utterly co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry and now serves Big Pharma's commercial interests rather than anything resembling a commitment to honest science or public safety. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| A good bill would require the FDA to take specific actions, levy certain fines, and oversee the necessary safety studies.
The Republican argument that banning drug advertising on television would be "unconstitutional" tells us all just how quickly and easily some Republicans have forgotten what the Constitution really says. Freedom of Speech does not protect the right to harm (and ultimately kill) American citizens through a mass campaign of false advertising that promotes deadly products to people who are being tricked into thinking they really need them. |
| The people who make decisions about the safety of the drugs approved in this country should have no financial ties to the companies impacted by their decisions. It's common sense.
Pretty simple, huh? Five reforms that would restore some honesty and integrity to the FDA.
Protecting consumers from dangerous drugs is really not that difficult. The necessary reforms are easy to see. It's just that drug companies have their financial tentacles wrapped around so many legislators that real reforms are politically strangled to death before they have a chance to get voted on ("killed in committee"). |
| The FDA should be hammering drug companies with stringent safety requirements, skeptical thinking about drug benefits claims and huge fines for those companies that get caught conducting fraudulent science or burying the results of drug studies they don't want the public to see. To be really effective, the FDA needs:
1) Complete independence from Big Pharma. This means the agency must run on public funds only and receive no money from the industry it claims to regulate.
2) A new set of scary teeth. |
| Allow the FDA to review the safety of newly approved drugs 18 months after approval, and then again at 36 months (three years).
4) Raise the amount of money paid to the FDA by drug companies for the review and approval of their drugs.
5) Creates a Reagan-Udall non-profit foundation that could put the FDA in the drug business, allowing it to license and collect royalties on pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
Analysis, commentary and satire by Mike Adams
Okay, let's get to the real story here. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The real FDA: Profits first, safety last
Here's the real FDA, in my view: Colluding with drug companies, suppressing clinical trial data, covering up the truth about dangerous prescription drugs, refusing to pull drugs off the market even though they are literally killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. The FDA: Censoring its own drug safety scientists to make sure they don't go public with their information about how dangerous these drugs are. The FDA: Under the table deals with drug companies? Maybe. Lots of political influence with the leaders of drug companies? Probably. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The FDA is the single greatest threat to the health and safety of the American people, and today, with the passage of S.1082, the U.S. Senate has clearly said that it believes the FDA should have even more power over the people. Apparently, enough Americans have not died yet. The body count has not yet reached a number sufficient to override campaign funding bribes paid to senators by drug companies. The pharmaceutical holocaust is not yet large enough to demand real reform.
It is my belief that with this vote, U.S. Senators have betrayed their nation. |
| This is one of the greatest safety threats in the history of America.
The battle now moves to the House and then to a conference committee. The legislation is being ramrodded through before the general public knows what is happening. Mainstream media, a primary client of Big Pharma, is intentionally failing to explain the true meaning of S1082. There is still time for Americans to determine their fate. |
| Health freedom advocates are now characterizing the final bill as the, "Big Pharma Protection Act of 2007" due to its emphasis on protecting the monopoly drug market in the United States while doing very little to accomplish its stated goals of increasing the "safety" of prescription drugs.
Analysis by Mike Adams (opinion)
The passage of S.1082 is a terrible defeat for Americans, but a huge victory for Big Pharma and the FDA. The bill expands the FDA's powers and keeps in place a hugely profitable Big Pharma monopoly over U.S. consumers that is right now bankrupting our nation. |
| All of this was staged to confuse the public and perpetuate a myth that safety legislation was being meaningfully debated.
What was really being debated was the extent to which the Big Pharma monopoly would be allowed to continue, an issue that was too politically incorrect to describe publicly. The debate was actually about how sharply Big Pharma's exorbitant profits and reckless behavior would be curtailed compared to how many Americans would be exposed to injury and death at the hands of Big Pharma. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 What's obvious is that this 8-in-1 dynamo safety tool can help you out in a number of difficult situations. Along with a working cell phone, it's the one tool to have by your side when traveling virtually anywhere. (Note: TSA authorities may not allow you to carry this on an airplane, so pack it in your luggage instead.) It's also a perfect gift to give someone who puts a lot of miles on the road traveling, commuting, taking the kids camping or even just driving to the grocery store (95% of all car accidents happen within two miles of home). |
| Give them this 8-in-1 Dynamo Emergency Tool and you'll feel a whole lot better about their safety.
No car or home should be without a tool like this. Emergency preparedness is everyone's individual responsibility. It's also important to prepare before disaster strikes. Once a storm hits, or a car accident happens, or you find yourself stranded in the wilderness, it's too late to take precautions. Take action ahead of time, before you anticipate needing the emergency tools, and you'll rest easier every time you travel.
Get yours now at: http://www.betterlifegoods.com/ProductDetails.asp? |
| I carefully consider products that are important for personal health and safety, and this is one that I chose to invest some big dollars in so that we could make it available to the public. Every single person I've shown it to was delighted to see it, and everybody wanted one!
You can get the product here: http://www.betterlifegoods.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BLG%2DCAT21430
Here's the promotional text from the BetterLifeGoods. |
| Better Life Goods (a company I own, see full disclosure below) has just finished a large production run on an new, unique safety and preparedness tool available now at www.BetterLifeGoods.com that combines an LED flashlight, cell phone charger, AM/FM radio, seatbelt cutter, glass break tool, hazard light and siren in a compact, hand-held product that operates on either batteries or dynamo (a winding handle that generates electricity as you rotate it). |
| Personal safety: This 8-in-1 tool is shaped much like a hammer, and it can be easily gripped and wielded as a surprisingly effective self defense weapon by using the glass break metal point to strike an aggressor. To those who haven't studied self defense, it may not sound like an effective weapon, but in fact many self defense weapons (such as the Kubotan keychain weapon) are based on the same concept: concentrating physical momentum into a tiny point that can cause severe pain to an attacker. One strike to the temple, and any attacker still standing is likely to flee. |
| Every home needs an emergency safety tool that works without batteries, because when the power's out, you need to be able to operate these tools by hand, using the dynamo crank handle.
Other uses of our 8-in-1 Dynamo Emergency Tool include:
Camping: It makes a perfect flashlight and radio.
Off-grid travel: For traveling anywhere that doesn't have electricity.
Visiting national parks: Parks like Yellowstone are enormous, and cell phones simply don't work there. Keep this preparedness tool in your car at all times. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In other words, drug safety no longer has any basis in absolutely safety to the patient and is, instead, based on each drug's relative safety to other dangerous drugs.
By taking this stance, the FDA has made dangerous drugs the default. Consumers may now assume that all FDA-approved drugs are inherently dangerous and meet no reality-based safety standard whatsoever! Please also note that the FDA never applies such risk/reward calculations to herbs or dietary supplements. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This is necessary, the ABC tells us, for "safety reasons." But who's safety? Certainly not the safety of the consumer, since dead or cooked nuts are far less nutritious than living, raw nuts. It turns out the focus is on the safety of the industry, and killing all the almonds before allowing them to be sold to consumers is a way to insulate the almond industry from lawsuits stemming from rare salmonella outbreaks that afflict a tiny number of consumers with compromised immune systems. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| One vote was on the Grassley amendment #1039 which would have given true power to scientists in the FDA responsible for regulating the safety of drugs already on the market. The FDA and Big Pharma were adamantly opposed to this amendment. The vote was Big Pharma 47 -- Americans 46, defeating the amendment. This vote was not only a sell out of Dr. David Graham and other FDA scientists who have gone to Congress as whistleblowers to save American lives, it was an "acid-test" vote on who is truly on Big Pharma's payroll. Click here to see how your senators voted. |
| They have sold out the health and safety of the American people to the wealthiest and most profitable corporations in the world: Drug companies. Our senators have stolen from the poor and given to the rich. They've allowed a criminal price-fixing enterprise to continue dominating medicine in America today, and they've failed to take any meaningful action to deliver what Americans demand the most: Free market access to medications that are provably safe and effective.
Our Senate has failed us, just as conventional medicine and the FDA have failed us. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| But who's safety? Certainly not the safety of the consumer, since dead or cooked nuts are far less nutritious than living, raw nuts. It turns out the focus is on the safety of the industry, and killing all the almonds before allowing them to be sold to consumers is a way to insulate the almond industry from lawsuits stemming from rare salmonella outbreaks that afflict a tiny number of consumers with compromised immune systems. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| And yet most lawmakers and government officials pretend the big threat to the safety of Americans is found somewhere else, in a foreign land, rather than right here at home. If anyone in the Bush Administration really cared about protecting the lives of Americans, they would summon the military to surround the FDA and start arresting the criminal-minded officials who run the agency. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Consumer Product safety Commission (CPSC) that there's really no need to enhance the safety monitoring of consumer products in the United States. Under orders from the White House, Nord insisted that the CPSC didn't need any increase in funding, and that businesses should essentially remain unregulated. Nancy Nord, who is now widely regarded as a pro-business Bush puppet, jetted around the world on trips paid for by some of the very same wealthy corporations who don't want consumer product safety regulations. |
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