Drug companies have ties to pain (advocacy) organizations.
As the Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation Tuesday into the relationship between makers of narcotic painkillers and the groups that champion them, a leading advocacy organization said it was dissolving “due to irreparable economic circumstances.”
The American Pain Foundation, which described itself as the nation’s largest organization focused on patients’ pain, was the subject of a December investigation by ProPublica in The Washington Post that detailed its close ties to drugmakers.
The group received 90 percent of its $5 million in funding in 2010 from the drug and medical-device industry, ProPublica found, and its guides for patients, journalists and policymakers had played down the risks associated with opioid painkillers while exaggerating the benefits from the drugs.
It is unclear whether the group’s announcement Tuesday evening — that it would “cease to exist, effective immediately” — was related to letters senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the finance panel chairman, and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent earlier in the day to the foundation, drug companies and others.
In the letters, the senators cited an “an epidemic of accidental deaths and addiction resulting from the increased sale and use of powerful narcotic painkillers.” That class of drugs includes popular brand names like Oxycontin, Vicodin and Opana.
Growing evidence, they wrote, suggests that drug companies “may be responsible, at least in part, for this epidemic by promoting misleading information about the drugs’ safety and effectiveness.”
A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2003 noted that the commission partnered with Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, to distribute pain educational materials nationwide. The committee's letter to Purdue noted that the company pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it misled regulators, physicians and consumers about Oxycontin's risk of addiction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/senate-panel-investigates-drug-companies-ties-to-pain-groups/2012/05/08/gIQA2X4qBU_story.html?hpid=z4
American Pain Foundation shuts down as senators launch investigation of prescription narcotics.
http://www.propublica.org/article/senate-panel-investigates-drug-company-ties-to-pain-groups
Americans consume 80% of the world's pain pills as prescription drug abuse epidemic explodes.
Americans consume 80 percent of the world's supply of painkillers -- more than 110 tons of pure, addictive opiates every year -- as the country's prescription drug abuse epidemic explodes.
That's enough drugs to give every single American 64 Percocets or Vicodin. And pain pill prescriptions continue to surge, up 600 percent in ten year, thanks to doctors who are more and more willing to hand out drugs to patients who are suffering.
As more people get their hands on these potentially-dangerous drugs, more are taking them to get high. Their drug abuse leads to 14,800 deaths a year -- more than from heroin and cocaine combined.
Nationwide, police are reporting increases in robberies and other crimes by people who are addicted to oxycodone and hydrocodone, the key ingredient in most prescription pain pills.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2142481/Americans-consume-80-percent-worlds-pain-pills-prescription-drug-abuse-epidemic-explodes.html
How Big Pharma and the Psychiatric Establishment Drugged Up Our Kids?
How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive “pediatric psychopharmacology” that finds ADHD, pediatric conduct disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, assorted “spectrum” disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders, and even schizophrenia under every rock? And how did this branch of psychiatry come to find the answer to the “psychopathologies” in the name of the discipline itself: pediatric psychopharmacology? Just good marketing. Pharma is wooing the pediatric patient because that’s where the money is. Just like country and western songs about finding love where you can when there is no love to be found at home. Pharma has stopped finding “love” in the form of the new blockbuster drugs that catapulted it through the 1990s and 2000s. According to the Wall Street Journal, new drugs made Pharma only $4.3 billion in 2010 compared with $11.8 billion in 2005—a two-thirds drop.
AstraZeneca, whose controversial Seroquel® still makes $5.3 billion a year though it is no longer new, now conducts “payer excellence academies” to teach sales reps to sell insurers and state healthcare systems on its latest drugs. No wonder Pharma is finding “love” by prescribing drugs to the nation’s youngest (and oldest) patients, who are often behavior problems to their caregivers, who make few of their own drug decisions, and who are often on government health plans.
“Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs,” says former Pharma rep Gwen Olsen, author of Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher. “Children are forced by school personnel to take their drugs, they are forced by their parents to take their drugs, and they are forced by their doctors to take their drugs. So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and ‘longevity.’ In other words, they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma.”
Kids who start out with psychiatric diagnoses are not only lifers—they are expensive lifers usually shuttled into government programs that will pay for psychiatric drug “cocktails” that can approach $2,000 a month. What private insurer would pay $323 for an atypical antipsychotic like Zyprexa®, Geodon®, or Risperdal®, when a “typical” antipsychotic costs only about $40?
Not all medical professionals agree with the slapdash cocktails. Panelists at the 2010 American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting assailed Pharma for such “seat of the pants” drug combinations and called the industry nothing but a “marketing organization.”
Pediatric psychopharmacology is a billion-dollar business that sustains Pharma, Pharma investors on Wall Street, doctors, researchers, medical centers, clinical research organizations, medical journals, Pharma’s PR and ghostwriting firms, pharmacy benefits managers, and the FDA itself—which judges its value on how many drugs it approves. The only losers are kids given a probable life sentence of expensive and dangerous drugs, the families of these children, and the taxpayers and insured persons who pay for the drugs.
http://www.alternet.org/health/155459/how_big_pharma_and_the_psychiatric_establishment_drugged_up_our_kids/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203731004576046073896475588.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Health
The book big tobacco doesn't want you to read.
Amid the impressive collection of cactuses outside his modern two-story abode on the Stanford University campus, science historian Robert Proctor points to a few sad-looking tobacco plants that he's growing just for the hell of it. "They're not thriving here," he tells me offhandedly.
They obviously know their enemy. "I like to write about the history of the unseen and the untold," he explains. "Of controversy, but also of evil. Of abuse of science. Of science used for horrific purposes." Proctor's wide-ranging scholarly interests include Charles Darwin, the politics of gemstones, and Nazi doctors. His book is titled Golden Holocaust, a devastating new compendium of the tobacco industry's sins that lays out in head-shaking detail how a handful of companies painstakingly designed, produced, and mass-marketed the most lethal product on the planet.
By his own estimate, Proctor spent a decade poring over more than 100,000 tobacco industry documents unearthing details such as a primer on how to reach "young starters" and a 1970 Lorillard memo suggesting that "Negroes" smoke menthols to "mask" their "real/mythical odor." The 57-year-old prof is a walking encyclopedia of tobacco arcana, apt to mention things like "beaver," a rodent anal secretion sometimes added to cigarettes, perhaps to enhance "pack aroma." Or that as much as 90 percent of America's licorice supply is used as a cigarette sweetener. (Honey, chocolate, and sugar are also employed to make cigarette smoke more inhalable—and thus more addictive.) Or that around 4 percent of a cigarette's weight is made up of humectants like propylene glycol—basically antifreeze. "You can put things in cigarettes you can't put in dog food," Proctor says.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/tobacco-book-golden-holocaust-robert-proctor
"The Golden Holocaust" by Robert Proctor:
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270169