Sorry, I mean "Bring them to justice!"
Johnson & Johnson is being prosecuted in Boston for a kickback scheme to drug our parents and grandparents in nursing homes with the so-called "anti-psychotic" Risperdal, which causes strokes and diabetes, not to mention: abdominal pain, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, dry mouth, sore throat, abnormal walk, agitation, aggression, anxiety, chest pain, coughing, involuntary movements, nasal inflammation, decreased activity, decreased sexual desires, lack of coordination, impotence, dizziness, dry skin, difficulty urinating, heavy menstruation, tremor, weight gain, lethargic feelings, joint pain, difficulty ejaculating, and respiratory infection.
(Oops - I just can't help imitating a TV commercial once in a while. My wife is a carreer advertizing professional, aka "madwoman".)
I understand the utility of prosecuting a corporation: money - huge fines. Excellent. I absolutely wish the U. S. Attorney in Boston the best. But I really want to find individual criminals, too.
Somewhere there are a couple guys who got together and said to each other, "Hey, we can make a lot more money if we can get nursing homes to prescribe Risperdal for their residents on a routine basis. A little bit of payola might go a long way toward overcoming those silly objections that these people aren't psychotic, don't hurt anyone and really don't need to be neurologically disabled. And nobody really cares about old people anyway, that's why they're in nursing homes. We can get away with it."
Maybe a conversation like this actually happened, at some modern, little Wannsee Conference.
In 1945 Nazi Germany was destroyed utterly, but the world has never stopped going after individual perpetrators of the Holocaust. The monsters are almost all dead now, but we can't help knowing in the depths of our collective soul that they must still be hunted, each and every one, even into future lifetimes.
In 1865 the Confederate States of America were destroyed utterly, but for a century and a half the world has continued to fight racism. Even now we must enact and enforce hate crime laws against the likes of Edmund Ruffin, Josiah C. Nott and Thornton Stringfellow in our own day.
War against Big Pharma is fine, but I want to identify and prosecute the new monsters, too. What about Joseph Biederman for example? He is singularly responsible for putting thousands of young children on psychotropic drugs, ruining a significant portion of a generation, all in the name of "bi-polar" or "ADHD", but really for money or just the pure thrill of destroying life.
Biederman's not the only one, but there are only a few who are truly evil. We need to find them and bring them in. For practical purposes, there is no higher calling.
I agree completely and wholly. People can get angry at "Big Pharma" all they want but it is like saying "I don't like government"; a generality that will ultimately never lead to change or improvement. Big Pharma, just like government is guided and run by individuals, individuals who have to be accountable for their actions. Particularly when those actions effect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
ReplyDeleteWho are your top three suggested targets? That's the key question.
ReplyDeleteUnder side effects, add sudden cardiac death, also bulbar palsey, i.e., paralysis of muscles of swallowing with aspiration and sudden death or
ReplyDeletejust aspiration pneumonia and not so sudden death. The list of adverse effects is such that there is no human being or animal to whom this class of drugs should be given.
ABC national news had a piece on these drugs still given in nursing homes, off-label I am sure, causing lots of deaths -- bulbar palsey and sudden cardiac deaths I am sure. These poor departed deserve their day in court.
Every one of the monsters in the Harvard Mass General Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit, and in every pediatric psychopharmacology unit in the US, is thus poisoning normal children, and abnormal or diseased children -- CP, autistic, retarded -- they don't care.
A great question. After some cursory research my list to investigate would be:
ReplyDeleteNumber one for me is Sidney Taurel - Ex-CEO and now Chairman of Eli Lilly. He has been an executive at Lilly for over 25 years and lead the company to become the top maker of Psychiatric drugs.
Jeff Kindler - The new CEO of Pfizer, who took home a cool 15 million in salary last year. He is a lawyer who is lauded for his business acumen and ability to make his company profit.
William C. Weldon - of Johnson & Johnson who took home almost 30 million last year.
Norman B. Anderson - from the APA. He is it's CEO and director. He has recently been working to defend big pharma's blatant "gifting" to psychiatrists