Stacy Malkan
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 Led by the industry trade group — the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association (CTFA) — lobbyists swarmed the state capitol wearing matching "No on SB 484" pins. Mary Kay, Avon, Estee Lauder, L'Oreal, Neutrogena, Johnson & Johnson and other major companies lined up at legislative hearings to testify against the bill. According to state records, Procter & Gamble paid Sacramento lobbyists more than $260,000 and the CTFA spent half a million dollars in 2005 opposing the safe cosmetics bill and other environmental health legislation in California. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Big Pharma and the FDA hate all 11 Grassley amendments and Big Pharma has its legion of lobbyists trying to defeat them as you read this. Support the Grassley amendments for true and meaningful safety reform.
Major Problem #3 -- A Sneak Attack on Dietary Supplements.
As I have been reporting for the last week, language relating to the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA creates a new regulatory category and broadens FDA power in a way that can be used to attack dietary supplements. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| According to Public Citizen, an army of over 1,000 lobbyists assured the passage of the Medical Modernization Act. The winners: pharmaceuticals, HMOs, and allied medical groups. The losers: need I tell you? • Pharmaceutical corporations are now trying to patent, without patients' acceptance or knowledge, genes from some patients that could lead to cures being shelved for breast cancer and other diseases. What this means is that corporate America is trying to steal the genetic material inherent in some individuals. |
| Politicians, heads of regulatory agencies, lobbyists, educators, researchers, media, charities, health care professionals, and others discussed elsewhere, have been placed in positions to assist in the accomplishment of corporate goals.
Again, without insulin being treated as a biotech drug, without batch testing, without independent labs for analysis/ research, and even more importantly, with no accurate reporting results for adverse events, corporate dollars increase regardless of product efficacy. |
| Throw in some undisclosed perks for low-paid government employees; stir in some Congressional meddling or arm-twisting for favored lobbyists; add a good measure of risk assessment whereby collateral damage (personal injury or death) can be offset by corporate profitability; flavor with smidges of greed, apathy, and egotism, and voila! The poisonous concoction is complete...and ready to be served to gullible consumers who believe our government cares.
Consider the FDA's most recent stand on the abuse of children via pharmaceuticals. |
| More than half of the pharmaceutical lobbyists are either former members of Congress, former congressional aides, or persons who worked in some other areas of the federal government — such as the FDA, NIH, and HHS (Health and Human Services) — that gave them good perspective into the machinations of government. In other words, they understand how the wheels of government are greased and are not averse to doing the greasing.
Huge sums of money, adroitly brandished and dispensed by knowledgeable insiders, have, in essence, sabotaged our political system. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Vitamins and supplements are classified as foods, not drugs. lobbyists for the vitamin and supplement industry have blocked efforts by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the federal agency responsible for health, to get involved. |
Stacy Malkan
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| CTFA had also been on a hiring spree: new lobbyists on staff included John Herson, former majority leader of the Maryland General Assembly, and Elvis Oxley, son of US Congressman Mike Oxley (R-Ohio) and former director of the Ripon Society, a Republican lobby group. Oxley would join the DC lobby effort, freeing up lobbyist Mike Thompson to "fight 24-7 in California." A new stepped-up communications plan would be spearheaded by Kathleen Dezio, who was "fresh from similar challenges in the beverage industry. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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| Historically, lobbyists for the dairy and cattle industries have pressured the USDA to include recommendations for dietary intakes of meat and dairy products that are not always in the best interests of our health.
The Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) recommendations made by the USDA and the "bigger is better" attitude that prevails in our country have created an opening for many vitamin and supplement producers to recommend taking very high doses of vitamins, sometimes up to 1,000 times the already-high recommended daily dose! |
Devra Davis
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 As part of its program to see science as nothing but a tool for public relations, tobacco industry lobbyists succeeded in using the absence of human studies as proof that there was no harm. What does this mean for other modern hazards? Wherever proof of human harm is lacking—as it typically is—the conditions that may give rise to this harm can continue without interruption. "Show me the proof" becomes the mantra of those who would have us do nothing. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| A politician who declines to legislate for fear of offending wealthy campaign contributors and lobbyists?
Recommended Reading
• Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs (1999) by Stephen M. Fried
• Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle Over Fen-Phen (2001) by Alicia Mundy
• Prescription for Profits: How the Pharmaceutical Industry
Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business (1997) by Linda Marsa
• Prescription for Disaster: The Hidden Dangers in Your Medicine Cabinet (1998) by Thomas J. |
| In other words, the pharmaceuticals can go one-on-one with the politicians, and still have a few lobbyists left over to "deliver the coffee."
Let's take a look at a simple example. Recently, Randall L. Tobias was appointed as the AIDS Czar. The internet site,
OpenSecrets.org, reveals a list of 66 contributions by the Tobias family and Lilly chairmen since the 1990s to the Republican cause.3 Perhaps Mr. Tobias and his family were merely supporting their beliefs; and perhaps President George W. Bush found that Mr. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 After all, there are lobbyists to please. The public be damned.
To turn the tables on the food lobbyists, and in an effort to educate the public about the details of which grocery ingredients to avoid, I've written a book on the subject called "Grocery Warning." This book reveals all the dangerous ingredients to be avoided, along with which foods and beverages contain them. It presents shopping lists: foods to avoid vs. foods to buy, and helps shopper make informed, health-enhancing foods choices each time they shop for groceries. You'll find details on this book at TruthPublishing. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The burden of proof lies with government and lobbyists, who say the doses found in canned goods and plastics are very low. But what dose of this toxic chemical is really safe? No one seems to know.
The toxicity of BPA
"BPA reads like a case study of how badly our chemical safety system is broken," said Jane Houlihan, Vice President for Research at EWG. "We've known it's toxic for 75 years, it's polluting the bodies of almost all Americans, but we allow it in our food at levels that leave no margin of safety for pregnant women and young children. |
Charles Barber
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 Big Pharma has the largest lobbying contingent in the country— there are more drug lobbyists than members of Congress28—which has helped create an extraordinarily regulation-friendly environment for the industry. The New York Times has stated baldly that the pharmaceutical industry "often gets what it asks for from Congress and the executive branch. |
Stacy Malkan
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| According to state records, Procter & Gamble paid Sacramento lobbyists more than $260,000 and the CTFA spent half a million dollars in 2005 opposing the safe cosmetics bill and other environmental health legislation in California.4
"The industry opposed this bill as though it were a peasant revolt rather than a right-to-know bill," said Andy Igrejas, environmental health director of the National Environmental Trust, which sponsored the bill along with the Breast Cancer Fund and Breast Cancer Action. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Much to the surprise of the cholesterol/heart disease lobbyists, elevated cholesterol wasn't among these risks. In the concluding remarks of the 10-year study, researchers wrote that the relative risk for heart attack can be lowered by about 80 percent just by doing three things: eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, getting regular exercise, and avoiding smoking. Since cholesterol-lowering drugs have not been shown to lower the risk of heart attack, they were notably absent in the study's list of recommendations, much to the annoyance of the major statin producers. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 The one thing that doctors, HMOs, hospitals, lobbyists and drug manufacturers have in common is their pursuit of money under the guise of health care. It is a broken, unworkable system that puts you in a vulnerable position. Until we have free health care for all Americans focused on disease prevention instead of disease management, our health will continue to decline and the costs to manage our self-inflicted diseases will continue to soar. |
| Rather than create a viable model that actually benefits all Americans, our politicians, operating under the narcotic influence of health care industry lobbyists armed with tons of cash, have allowed the creation of the costliest health care system in the world. Despite the high cost, the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. 37th out of 191 countries. We are not getting what we paid for, or we are paying for the wrong things. It is enough to give one a migraine. |
Roberta Bivins
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 As the historian and acupuncturist Rey Tiquia has documented, western medical doctors were the principal lobbyists for new regulations intended to exclude the Chinese (as well as competitors from other systems) from practising medicine. Orthodox western practitioners outnumbered Chinese healers by almost ten to one in the 1861 census of Victoria, and were clearly the most prominent healing community. So why did the combination of Chinese healers and intransigent disease produce such a ferocious reaction? |
Mike Adams
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 Drug companies hired 675 different lobbyists from 138 firms in 2002 - nearly seven lobbyists for each U.S. senator. $91.4 million was spent on lobbying activities in 2002, and the spending has
Only grown Since. -Public Citizen
The key to effective drug marketing is direct-to-consumer drug advertising—a practice that's banned everywhere else except, of course, in the United States. In a blatant move to prop up the profits of Big Pharma, the FDA legalized direct-to-consumer advertising in late 1997, and the drug industry has been racking up record profits and revenue growth ever since. |
Mark Schapiro
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 I sat in parliamentary hearings where I was able to identify lobbyists not only for the U.S. and European chemical industries, but representatives of "downstream" chemical users from U.S. cement, automobile, packaging, textile, and pharmaceutical companies. Also in attendance were representatives of South African mining companies, Japanese electronics firms, and the big British retail outlet Boots. |
Mike Adams
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| Drug companies hired 675 different lobbyists from 138 firms in 2002 - nearly seven lobbyists for each U.S. senator. $91.4 million was spent on lobbying activities in 2002, and the spending has
Only grown Since. -Public Citizen
The key to effective drug marketing is direct-to-consumer drug advertising—a practice that's banned everywhere else except, of course, in the United States. In a blatant move to prop up the profits of Big Pharma, the FDA legalized direct-to-consumer advertising in late 1997, and the drug industry has been racking up record profits and revenue growth ever since. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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| Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health that lobbyists for the American Restaurant Association promote their agenda without regard to the health consequences of individual people. Eric Schlosser, in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, discusses how fast-food restaurants have figured out that they can increase sales by promoting "super-size" portions of food. |
Mark Schapiro
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| Those included officials of the American Electrical Alliance, who knew, like Mike Kirschener, that they would have to prepare their membership for the changes that were coming to their industry. lobbyists with the American Chemical Council, representing the U.S. chemical industry, were watching, for they were discovering that they had to spend more time worrying about legislation emanating from Brussels than they did from Washington, D.C. |
Devra Davis
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| The same day that the president was mocking Califano's antismok-ing efforts during his visit to North Carolina, the AMA Education and Research Fund released a lavishly printed report on a study that took four years and considerable money to complete, with more than eight hundred researchers and untold numbers of lobbyists. This much bal-lyhooed AMA report consisted of nothing but a potpourri of mostly unrelated studies that reached a rather lame conclusion. "The bulk of the research . . . |
Mark Schapiro
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| The chamber was packed with legislative aides, lobbyists, and environmental-health activists. Nine months earlier, a Harvard School of Public Health study had revealed alarming levels of DEHP in the urine of babies in two Boston intensive-care hospitals, who were being exposed through the plastic tubing and bags used for intravenous fluids. |
| The Weinburg Group's Brussels-based lobbyists had been a leading voice of U.S. industry opposition to the EU's phthalate initiatives, and would later send its vice president for Applied Toxicology and Risk Sciences, Dr. Jim Lamb, to represent them in Sacramento.42 Like many U.S. industries, the Weinburg Group is experiencing the unsettled tensions between Europe and America's conflicting standards. "When I was at EPA," Lamb told me, "the Europeans were following what the United States was doing. Now, it's becoming more and more the precautionary principle over there. . . . |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| REPPED: Before you decide to chew on the cap of your water bottle because you're nervous, make sure the plastic you are chewing on isn't full of carcinogens and chemicals -- even though lobbyists for the plastics industry argue that any traces of the toxic substance bisphenol A are low and therefore, insubstantial.
Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found most commonly in polycarbonate plastics. According to the Bisphenol-A. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 The fact that this bill was passed in the early-morning hours (perhaps so C-SPAN viewers would not be watching), surrounded by hundreds of pharmaceutical lobbyists (who, according to some observers, wrote much of the bill), and that many of the major politicians and staffers who pushed the bill through the legislative process ended up working for the industry is a national disgrace. But laws can be changed and we must encourage our politicians to stand up to the powerful drug industry just as we exhort our doctors to do the same. |
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