From the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice
Since 2004, the pharmaceutical industry has paid $9 billion to settle thousands of criminal and civil complaints related to the illegal marketing of drugs that kill or injure a million Americans EVERY YEAR from adverse drug reactions (ADRs).
Attorney Jonathan W. Emord provides an overview of the arrangements made between the FDA, drug companies and the Americans they kill and injure for profit, reminding us that Vioxx may have killed as many Americans as the Vietnam War:
(T) principal problem that we have is that our Republic… has been transformed into a bureaucratic oligarchy. (N)ine-tenths of all federal law comes in the form of federal regulations from individuals that are not elected… and they head up the various federal agencies – over 220 of them…
The FDA is a captive of the drug industry – this is no revelation for those like me who are forever confronting circumstances in which the FDA does one thing or another that protect the economic interests of its favored regulatees – the drug industry.
If you were tomorrow to disallow lobbying they would still do the very same thing. And the reason is that the Commissioner of the FDA is there for a short period of time. When he/she leaves office (and plays his cards right) they’re going to employed directly by the pharmaceutical industry or at a paid chair of a pharmaceutical company. This leads to a culture which the drug industry is in control…
Although the Justice Department routinely pursues cases like this, the fact that a company like Astra Zeneca can pay a $520 million fine for the illegal marketing of a drug that generates $4 billion a year smacks of arrangements once made between small town mayors, their appointed police chiefs and local madams. And unlike drug cartels that are shut down and kingpins that are jailed, US drug companies are typically allowed to pay fines, avoid jail sentences and raise drug prices to offset fines.
These companies could not do this without the support of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Watch video and read additional supporting evidence here.
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