Not that we at Progressive Action want to make Big Pharma and their nefarious deeds the focus of this blog, it seems that lately a plethora of disturbing trends with Big Pharma have surfaced and caught the eye of many critics.  We’ve looked at the poor quality research, lack of controlled clinical trials in new drugs, including the well documented trend of pharmacutical companies to place drugs on the market long before anyone knows the effects of the drugs — remember Phen-Fen, the supposed magical weight-loss drug that caused sudden death in millions?  Remember the anti-arthritis drug —- pulled from the market after it was shown to cause fatal cardiac arrest in users?

We’ve also posted reports on the collusion of Big Pharma with physicians who have basically become salesman.  No law exists to mandate the doctors disclose to their patients the financial relationship they have with the company manufacturing the drugs they proscribe.

We also posted an article that dealt with one psychologists’ experience in the field of psychology and his run-ins with the use of psychology and psychiatry to keep soldiers in combat zones longer.  Many claim that un-checked corporate power poses no problem to our society and that conversely regulation causes an un-needed burden that hampers profits, which hurts the economic health of the nation.  But Big Pharma provides the strongest argument in real time against this idea.  With widely unchecked access to the non-professional public and doctors through endless advertising, with their high revenue streams, the pharmecutical industry has managed to convince lay people, patients and even doctors that the resolution to a problem of mood, excitement, anxiety; all once thought of as warnings of a dysfunctional living pattern or a need to change one’s environment or behavior, is encapsulated in a pill.

The profits of Big Pharma are outstanding; they are one of the most profitable industries in America today.  Private health insurance companies once played along to provide high priced financing to middle Americans to purchase drugs at whatever cost pharma wanted to pay.  But they have begun to resist and deny payments for most high ticket drugs, leaving patients often scrambling to find the funds to pay for drugs whose lives hang on the affordability of such medications.  One of the largest stickers in Obama’s efforts to put together a single payer plan was the resistance of the well financed and powerful drug companies.  So we are told.

Most disturbing is the power over people’s sense of reality and well being that drug companies seem to have developed through the pushing of psychiatric medications.  Troubling evidence shows, as one article we posted, that the field of psychiatry and that health officials in the government and military are fully aware of the power of psychiatric drugs to make people compliant, passive zombies.

In the article linked below by Alternet, the newer trend in starting children early as drug users has many disturbing implications — the long term effects of such drug use is unknown and could be irreversible and also not mentioned in the thorough report (because how many angles can one writer take without writing a book?), is the increasing problem with prescription drug abuse among children.  Is it any wonder that children have come to believe that their problems not only are unacceptable and not something to deal with as the trials of everyday life, but that the solution lies in a pill?

One of the most important drivers to social rebellion and civil disobedience is a firm belief that something in the system is wrong.  This usually comes from suffering personally or witnessing a community suffer, the effects of a system, culture or society gone on the wrong track.  Whether its going against our internal social drive to commune and not kill, or the tendency to wish to act out against something wrong; we all have an internal conscience that when disturbed can cause all sorts of negative physical and psychological reactions.  Do we want to stunt this internal driver in us all to recognize right from wrong and want to do something about it?  Who or what exists in our present system that benefits from the status quo; benefits enough to make sure that nothing changes?

Below, Alternet has published an article showing the disturbing trend of using children as the next profit-center for Big Pharma.  This is especially disturbing since as we stated previously and was stated in articles posted here and all over the net, drug companies have nearly all but abandoned the practice of controlled clinical trials prior to release of a drug.   The use of manipulating parents to allow Big Pharma and greedy psychiatrists unfettered access to their children’s minds and bodies puts the illustration of corporate greed to a new Mengelesque level of low.

How Kids Are Getting Hooked on Pills for Life

October 18, 2012  |  

 

Where do parents and teachers get the idea there’s something wrong with kids that only an expensive drug can fix? From Big Pharma’s seamless web of ads, subsidized doctors, journals, medical courses and conferences, paid “patient” groups, phony public services messages and reporters willing to serve as stenographers.

Free stenography for Pharma from sympathetic media includes articles like “One in 40 Infants Experience Baby Blues, Doctors Say,” on ABC News and “Preschool Depression: The Importance of Early Detection of Depression in Young Children,” on Science Daily .

For many, the face of the drugs-not-hugs message is Harold Koplewicz, author of the pop bestseller It’s Nobody’s Fault , and former head of NYU’s prestigious Child Study Center. In a 1999 Salon article, Koplewicz reiterated his “no-fault” statement, assuring parents that psychiatric illness is not caused by bad parenting. “It is not that your mother got divorced, or that your father didn’t wipe you the right way,” he said. “It really is DNA roulette: You got blue eyes, blond hair, sometimes a musical ear, but sometimes you get the predisposition for depression.”

Many regard the NYU Child Study Center, which Koplewicz founded and led before leaving in 2009 to start his own facility, as helping to usher in the world of brave new pediatric medicine in which children, toddlers and infants, once expected to outgrow their problems, are now diagnosed with lifelong psychiatric problems. The Child Study Center is “a threat to the health and welfare of children,” and its doctors are “hustlers working to increase their ‘client’ population and their commercial value to psychotropic drug manufacturers,” charged Vera Sharav , president of the watchdog group, Alliance for Human Research Protection.

Read the rest on Alternet