Monday, May 7, 2012

Abbott Labs to Pay $1.6 Billion for Fraud Marketing of Drug Depakote

Under the law, a drug maker's promotional activities must be limited to uses approved by the FDA. Promotion by the manufacturer for "off-label" uses renders a product misbranded. In this particular case, Abbott pleaded guilty to misbranding Depakote by promoting the drug for off-label uses. One attorney described this case as elder abuse. Abbot Labs admitted that they specially trained their sales force to target nursing homes to control patients with agitation and aggression from dementia. There is no evidence that Depakote can control agitation in dementia patients. They also admitted to marketing Depakote with antipsychotic drugs to treat schizophrenia. Depakote actually failed to treat schizophrenia. According to press reports the FDA approved Depakote only for epileptic seizures, bipolar mania and the prevention of migraines. We think Abbot Labs sales force should also be accountable for this egregious act as the sales force indicated that they exploited the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987. Abbot Labs also gave kick-backs in the millions of dollars to pharmacists to promote their drug for off-label purposes. Many pharmaceutical companies have been found guilty of off label marketing. It looks like they consider promoting their failed drugs as standard procedure, and the fines for doing so a part of doing business. Will the pharmacists have to give back the kick-backs? Will the sales representative also be found liable in Abbot Labs scheme? We doubt it. Pharmaceutical companies make so much money that these fines are miniscule and governments don’t hold BigPharma executives or employees accountable. We feel they should be held criminally liable. We are sure the sales force will just say we were following orders just like the Nazi’s were. The populace needs to get behind holding these firms criminally accountable by pushing it upon their government representative. There are elderly victims of dementia. What kind of animal feels an elderly patient is a guinea pig for their failed drugs? Abbot Labs is one such animal.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Big Pharma Pushes Drug to ‘Cure Racism’

BigPharma and Psychiatry legally kill patients yearly with their drugs and blame the side effects or “patient went off his meds”. Now these guiltless irresponsible and immoral “scientists” say they can medicate someone from racial thoughts. The funny thing is most people will actually believe them. From (Paul Watson dprogram.net) – As part of the headlong rush towards a Brave New World society, the establishment is feverishly pushing pharmaceutical drugs that chemically castrate an individual’s ‘aberrant thoughts’, with the latest proposal claiming that people can be given a drug to “cure” racism. A study conducted by Oxford University experimental psychologist Dr Sylvia Terbeck into the heart disease drug Propranolol, published in the journal Psycho pharmacology, found that the drug “may have the unusual side-effect of combating racism.” “Volunteers given the beta-blocker, used to treat chest pains and lower heart rates, scored lower on a standard psychological test of “implicit” racist attitudes,” reports the Telegraph. “They appeared to be less racially prejudiced at a subconscious level than another group treated with a “dummy” placebo pill.” The test subjects were shown images of people of different races along with positive and negative words. They were also asked to rate how “warm” their feelings were to different groups. Results showed that participants on the drug were more likely to be “biased towards being non-racist at a subconscious level” compared to those taking the placebo. “Such research raises the tantalizing possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs, a possibility that requires careful ethical analysis,” said Co-author Professor Julian Savulescu, from Oxford University’s Faculty of Philosophy. By arguing that the widespread use of antidepressants like Prozac has established the ethical foundation of using drugs to alter thought patterns and behavior, scientists contend that “manipulating morals” through “pharmacologically-induced altruism” should also be acceptable. And they’re right – it is acceptable – but only if you wish to create a society along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s fictional scientific dictatorship in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. In the book, the consumption of the drug coma is universally endorsed by the ‘World State’ in order to destroy individuality, which is frowned upon as a mental illness, and eliminate the need for personal allegiances to religion or anything beyond the state itself. Drugging people to “cure” their racism would also empower the establishment to define what ideological or political thoughts are aberrant and dangerous. Of course, slavish devotion to the authorities would not be one of them. “It is scary to think that it is considered morally obnoxious to call someone a derogatory name, but absolutely fine to drug people into complying with a political ideology. What ever happened to ‘I disagree with you opinion but I’d defend to the death your right to say it’?” writes D Holt. As we highlighted earlier this week, it’s not just the pharmaceutical establishment pushing for this, top professors at major universities are also big advocates. New York University bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao wrote a paper in which he promoted the use of pharmacological drugs to make people more environmentally sensitive so that they would be more likely to donate money to ‘climate change’ organizations like Oxfam. Liao said he had already received enthusiastic support for the idea from a major pharmaceutical company. Although the more spiritually enlightened would argue that racism is a relic of humanity’s brutal past, it cannot be argued that before the influence of modern society, racism was merely defined as tribalism and was practiced globally as an innate survival mechanism. To characterize racism as a mental illness that has to be targeted with pharmaceutical drugs would grease the skids for all manner of natural behaviors to be re-defined as aberrant. Indeed, we are already seeing attempts to define distrust of authority as a mental disease with the increasing prominence of “oppositional defiant disorder”. Mandating that ‘thought crimes’ like racism be medicated out of existence represents the slippery slope towards the kind of scientific dictatorship beyond Aldous Huxley’s worst nightmares.