Monday, June 17, 2013

Smart People Say No to (legal) Drugs

If you take a prescription drug that has been FDA-approved ~~ I don't know any other way to say this ~ you are stupid. Here are the uncomfortable facts:

  • Death by hospital: 119,000 people a year in the US  
  • Death by legal, FDA-approved drugs: 106,000 people are killed  
  • Serious adverse drug reactions: 2,000,000 people a year. 4th leading cause of death. 350,000 nursing home patients.
The FDA, amazingly, admits this.


To contrast, Zheng Xiaoyou was the chief of China's State Food and Drug Administration. He was found guilty of taking bribes and approving a dangerous antibiotic, and he was executed. Ten (10) people had died. That's ten, as in ten. 

But in the Land of the Free, life is not so dear. What other industry could be such a literal, bloody failure and yet be solidly, immutably, and omnipotently empowered with the sacred responsibility to protect a nation from that very tragedy??  We are dead, Horatio.  The people appointed to protect us are killing us.

Maybe that's the problem.

Not one of the people at FDA is elected. Not one has to stand up to public inquiry and scrutiny. Not one. Every single FDA employee is there because of politics. The top honchos are cronies of CongressCritters or the Offal Office, and the grunts are there only so long as they go along and keep their mouth shut.   

Aspartame is a case in point. When the political regime in Washington changed in 1984, favors were called in to get it approved over the objections of key FDA scientists who were disgusted at the shoddy spurious science presented by G.D. Searle, whose chief was Donald Rumsfeld, who was now a Washington insider, who got his crony Arthur Hull Hayes appointed as FDA Chief, who did his boss's bidding, and who disappeared from the political scene shortly thereafter. (But, you say, aspartame is a food additive. No, it was "discovered" as a drug and categorized as a food additive to intentionally avoid safety studies, which its formulators know would have damned it.)

And so it goes. Today, a CEO for Big Pharma. Tomorrow, a regulator of Big Pharma. Next week, after elections, back to Big Pharma.

If you trust the FDA to assure that your Rx drugs are safe, you might as well put your life in Joe Biden's hands, or Dick Cheney's, or Donald Rumsfeld's, or Janet Napolitano's, or Janet Reno's; this is not a Dem or Rep attack ~~ they are all viperous scalawags and each has innocent blood on his/her/its hands. Politics rules the FDA, not adherence to principles of medicine and health.

If you are not stupid, you understand this very well.