Examples
- Corporations Straight Up Put it in a Report: Curing Patients isn’t a Good Business Model — “While this proposition [of fast cures] carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for… medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow,” says financial advisor to corporate researchers.
- Procter & Gamble, Bayer, CVS and Johnson & Johnson — Put banned poison in personal care products, sometimes at levels considered life threatening.
- Pharma Promoted Untrue Information to Sell Antidepressant Meds — Pharmaceutical companies promoted that depression is caused by low serotonin. Independent research finds that neither serotonin nor chemical imbalance of any sort are related to depression, while the side effects of the meds are severe.
- Facebook Intentionally Manipulated Emotional State of Users — “In 2014, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that Facebook intentionally manipulated the news feeds of almost 700,000 users in order to study ’emotional contagion through social networks.’ [They]… tested whether reducing the number of positive messages people saw made those people less likely to post positive content themselves. The same went for negative messages: Would scrubbing posts with sad or angry words from someone’s Facebook feed make that person write fewer gloomy updates? ‘If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation.’ “
- Tobacco Industry — Puts cancer-causing radioactive substance into products because it’s addictive.
- Monsanto / Bayer — Promoted poisonous, cancer-causing glyphosate (Roundup) as safe, even after they clearly knew it wasn’t.
- Johnson & Johnson — Put cancer-causing chemical additives in baby powder.
- Pharma Lying & Manipulation — Seven research trials; six showed the drug doesn’t work. The manufacturer published only the one that had a positive result.
- Pharma’s Corrupt Practices Specified in Exquisite Detail — They give lavish gifts to physicians, promote new “diseases,” set up phony “patient advocacy organizations,” “educate” doctors about drug’s unapproved uses, bury studies they don’t want seen, and more.
- Nestlé, Coca Cola, Danone, Unilever — Big food corporations control markets while farmers and consumers are held accountable for the devastation.
- Amazon — Creates “sweat shop” environment and suppresses employees rights to talk freely among themselves.
- Pharma Corporations Inundate Med School Students with Gifts — Recognizing the formative nature of the clinical years of medical education, pharmaceutical companies seek to influence medical students years before they are ready to independently practice medicine.
- Big Pharma Are Big Lobbyists — Pharmaceutical corporations are among the largest lobby groups in Washington DC. How is government lobbying by corporations different from bribery and corruption?
- Pharma Targets Election Candidates — Pharmaceutical control tactics include lying about candidates up for election.
- Pfizer Has Been Assessed Billions In Criminal Convictions — If the penalty for criminality doesn’t change the criminal behavior, is the system working?
- Insulin Founders Gave Away Patent for $1 Because “Insulin Belongs to the World”— Pharmaceutical corporations monopolized the distribution of insulin, charging diabetics $750/month. See also: The High Price of Insulin Is Literally Killing People.
- WantToKnow.Info Pharmaceutical Corruption Reports — Extremely excellent resource. Highlights powerful information found in verifiable media reports, organized by subject.
Readings & Resources
Corporations Straight Up Put it in a Report: Curing Patients isn’t a Successful Business Model
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” [financial] analysts ask. “The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy… However, such treatments [don’t promise] recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.” Richter cited Gilead Sciences’ treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company’s U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since.
– Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’, April 11, 2018
Hundreds of Personal Care Products Contain Banned Cancer-Causing Poison (Sold by P&G, Bayer, CVS, J&J and more)
“Decades of research” has found no safe levels of benzene exposure because it’s so toxic at very low levels. The petroleum-based chemical “causes cancer”, especially leukemia and in blood forming organs, the US Department of Health and Human Services wrote. The toxin has also been shown to harm the central nervous system and reproductive organs. The US banned benzene’s use as an ingredient nearly 45 years ago… Advocates took aim at the Food and Drug Administration for failing to do more to protect the public.
– Carcinogenic Chemical Benzene Found in Hundreds of US Personal Care Products
Poisonous, Cancer-Causing Glyphosate (Roundup) Sold as Safe
Roundup (glyphosate) is an… herbicide manufactured by agricultural giant Monsanto (now Bayer). It is used by farmers, gardeners, landscapers and agricultural workers in the United States and around the world as an all-purpose weed killer. Since it first entered the market in the 1970s, Monsanto has marketed Roundup as safe and effective. One advertisement characterized Roundup as “safer than table salt.” Studies have shown, however, that Roundup can cause cancer and a myriad of other serious health problems…
Evidence presented in the first lawsuits against Monsanto to proceed to trial indicate that Monsanto knew Roundup was carcinogenic for several decades. Rather than informing the public, Monsanto buried the risks as sales of Roundup continued to skyrocket around the world. Outraged by Monsanto’s deception, thousands of farmers, agricultural workers, gardeners, landscapers, and their families have sued Monsanto alleging that Roundup caused them to develop cancer.
The following cancers have been linked to Roundup exposure: Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, Colon Cancer, Liver Cancer, Pancreatic Cancer, Kidney Cancer, Melanoma, Thyroid Cancer, Bone Cancer, Breast Cancer. The first three Roundup cancer lawsuits to proceed to trial resulted in a combined $2.4 billion in jury verdicts.
– ResponsibleTechnology.org
Facebook Intentionally Manipulated the Emotional State of Users
In 2014, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that Facebook intentionally manipulated the news feeds of almost 700,000 users in order to study “emotional contagion through social networks.” The researchers, who are affiliated with Facebook, Cornell, and the University of California–San Francisco, tested whether reducing the number of positive messages people saw made those people less likely to post positive content themselves. The same went for negative messages: Would scrubbing posts with sad or angry words from someone’s Facebook feed make that person write fewer gloomy updates?
– 177 Years of Medical Experimentation
“If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. “This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent.” In the company’s current terms of service, Facebook users relinquish the use of their data for “data analysis, testing, [and] research.” This means that the experiment may technically have been legal (although Cornell and UCSF are federally-funded schools, so their participation may have required more specific informed consent). But scientists and lawyers alike all seem to agree that the study was completely unethical, and a violation of human rights.
It’s one thing to observe human emotions. It’s another to manipulate them.
Big Food Corporations Control Markets While Farmers & Consumers Are Held Accountable for the Devastation
Large-scale food and beverage companies… play an outsized role in driving disparities in human health and environmental sustainability. Food processing companies currently make one-fourth of every dollar spent on groceries in the U.S., with just a handful of companies controlling as much as 98.4% of the market share in some categories of prepared foods. By comparison, the country’s more than 2.5 million farmworkers, the majority of which are undocumented and unprotected by fair wage laws, get just eight cents for every dollar spent on groceries.
Food processing companies like Nestlé (Switzerland), Coca Cola (U.S.), Danone (France), and Unilever (United Kingdom/Netherlands) are bottlenecks in the global food system, exerting undue influence over both what and how much is produced by farmers upstream as well as what and how much is eaten by consumers downstream… Despite this concentration of power and wealth, international agendas for public health and sustainable food production often call for reform not by the most powerful food companies but, instead, by farmers and consumers.
– Stop Blaming Consumers — It’s Time to Hold Big Food Accountable
Tobacco Industry Includes Cancer-Causing Radioactive Substance Because It’s Addictive
In 1998, major tobacco industries’ internal secret documents were made available online by the Master Settlement Agreement, revealing that the industry was aware of the presence of a radioactive substance in tobacco as early as 1959. It was discovered in 1964 that the cancer-causing radioactive substance was Polonium 210, which millions still inhale in their cigarette smoke, unwittingly… Uranium mining is one source, as are the nuclear and coal-fired power industries… No matter where the uranium comes from, tobacco plants selectively absorb and concentrate the byproduct of its decay, Polonium 210, to dangerous — if not lethal — levels.
… The industry actually knew how to mitigate the problem, but realized it would interfere with the addictive power of their product (and therefore profitability) to do so: ‘Acid wash was discovered in 1980 to be highly effectively in removing (210)Po from the tobacco leaves; however, the industry avoided its use for concerns that acid media would ionize nicotine converting it into a poorly absorbable form into the brain of smokers thus depriving them of the much sought after instant “nicotine kick” sensation.‘
– Smoking is 36 Times Worse Than Working at a Nuclear Reactor
Amazon Practices + Comment from ex-Employee
This video reports on Amazon’s egregious treatment of employees. The comment below was made in response to the video.
More on the Pharmaceutical Industry, in Particular
Those same companies get approval from the people they paid (who we hired as our public servants and “representatives”) to take US taxpayer money for drug research and development. They then claim the profits from drugs developed on the taxpayer dime for themselves. And — in a particularly surreal sociopathic act — they sell those very same drugs that Americans paid for back to them at far higher prices than they charge around the world. Examples of all these norms are in the video, which also gives numerous examples of exactly how “big pharma” ensures continuation of this system that harms many.
The video closes with an introduction to an individual pharmacist running a small business who endeavored to remedy the situation for real families in need, but who was shut down by the systems that we allow to have power. Brand closes with an optimistic and practical look at what we can do about it… this is arguably the most important part of the video, because simply exposing the horrific behaviors without also reclaiming our power won’t help anyone.
Pharma Companies Inundate Med School Students with Gifts
Medical students’ exposure to pharmaceutical marketing begins early, growing in frequency throughout their training. Students receive gifts such as free meals, textbooks, pocket texts, small trinkets and even drug samples. Forty to 100 percent of medical students report exposure to the pharmaceutical industry… The number of students recalling over 20 exposures to marketing rose from 33.3 percent to nearly 72 percent as students entered their clinical training. Pharmaceutical companies, recognizing the formative nature of the clinical years of medical education, seek to form relationships with medical students years before they are ready to independently practice medicine. These interactions intensify throughout a physician’s training, ranging from trivial gifts such as pens and pads to more questionable large honoraria and consulting fees. Some resident physicians report an average of six pharmaceutical gifts annually, up to 70 industry sponsored lunches, and nearly 75 promotional items in one year.
– The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Role in U.S. Medical Education
Big Pharma Are Big Lobbyists
The pharmaceutical and health products industry — including not only drug manufacturers but also dealers of medical products and nutritional and dietary supplements — is consistently near the top of all spenders when it comes to federal campaign contributions and lobbying spending.
– OpenSecrets.org
A Major Focus for Pharma is Maintaining High Prices of Drugs
Twenty-two of Forbes magazine’s top 25 largest drug and biotech companies in the world were found to have lobbied on some variation of the term “drug pricing.” Collectively, these 22 companies spent more than $80 million on lobbying during this period.
– How big pharma lobbies to keep prescription drug prices high
Pharma Companies Give Lavish Gifts to Physicians, Promote New “Diseases,” Set Up Phony Patient Advocacy Organizations, “Educate” Doctors About Drug’s Unapproved Uses, Bury Studies They Don’t Want Seen, and More
Marcia Angell [is] a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School and [a] former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. Her new book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” is a sober, clear-eyed attack on the excesses of drug company power. How does the drug industry deceive us? It plies attending physicians with expense-paid junkets to St. Croix and Key West, Fla., where they are given honoraria and consulting fees to listen to promotional presentations. It promotes new or little-known diseases such as “social anxiety disorder” and “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” as a way of selling the drugs that treat them. It sets up phony front groups disguised as “patient advocacy organizations.” It hires ghostwriters to produce misleading scientific articles and then pays academic physicians to sign on as authors. It sends paid lackeys and shills out onto the academic lecture circuit to ”educate” doctors about a drug’s unapproved uses. It hires multinational PR firms to trumpet dubious studies as scientific breakthroughs while burying the studies that are likely to harm sales. It buys up the results of publicly funded research. It maintains a political chokehold on the American public by donating more money to political campaigns than any other industry in the country. For many years the drug industry has reaped the highest profit margins of any industry in America.
– The Boston Globe, September 5, 2004
Medical Whistleblower Speaks Out
Dr. Diane Harper says young girls and their parents should receive more complete warnings before receiving the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Dr. Harper helped design and carry out the Phase II and Phase III safety and effectiveness studies to get Gardasil approved, and authored many of the published, scholarly papers about it. She has been a paid speaker and consultant to Merck. It’s highly unusual for a researcher to publicly criticize a medicine or vaccine she helped get approved. Dr. Harper joins a number of consumer watchdogs, vaccine safety advocates, and parents who question the vaccine’s risk-versus-benefit profile.
– CBS News
Seven Research Trials: Six Showed the Drug Doesn’t Work. Manufacturer Published Only the One that Had a Positive Result.
Dr. Ben Goldacre is no slouch when it comes to rooting out the flaws in scientific studies, analyzing clinical trial data and recognizing when it’s been manipulated or fudged. But even Goldacre has been fooled by bad science. In … his forthcoming book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, … Goldacre describes how he ended up prescribing the antidepressant reboxetine to his patients based on insufficient data. The research overwhelmingly finds the drug to be ineffective, but it was still approved in the U.K. In order to get approval of the drug in Europe, the manufacturer had simply not published its negative data. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctors and researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published.
– Time Magazine, September 24, 2012
Effective Drugs Not Made Available Because They’re Not Profitable for Pharma Companies
In the current system, if a promising compound can’t be patented, it is highly unlikely ever to make it to market — no matter how well it performs in the laboratory.The development of new cancer drugs is crippled as a result... In 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that an off-the-shelf compound called 3-bromopyruvate could arrest the growth of liver cancer in rats. The results were dramatic; moreover, the investigators estimated that the cost to treat patients would be around 70 cents per day. Yet, three years later, no major drug company has shown interest in developing this drug. The hormone melatonin, sold as an inexpensive food supplement in the United States, has repeatedly been shown to slow the growth of various cancers when used in conjunction with conventional treatments. Early this year, another readily available industrial chemical, dichloroacetate, was found by researchers at the University of Alberta to shrink tumorsin laboratory animals by up to 75 percent. However … dichloroacetate is not patentable, and the lead researcher is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test the chemical. Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit, not on their patentability.
– April 1, 2007
Pharma Company Obtains Rights to Drug & Begins Charging Exorbitant Fees
There is a drug to treat LEMS that up until recently was free for patients through an FDA program called “compassionate use.” When Schuller got the drug, called 3,4-diaminopyridine, or 3,4-DAP, he instantly felt better. Ann Schuller, Will’s mother, said that about 40 minutes after her son took the pill for the first time, he was up and celebrating at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was being treated…
Since 1992, 3,4-DAP, was made by Jacobus Pharmaceuticals, a small New Jersey company, until a different company, Catalyst, recently received the exclusive rights to the drug. Catalyst added a preservative, renamed it Firdapse, and is now charging north of $375,000 a year for the life-changing drug.
– Life-Changing Treatment Going from Free to $375,000 a Year
See also: The Need to Reclaim Our Power – How Modern Medicine & the FDA Betray Humanity
What You Can Do
The only time you have control over is Now. A person can only feel or act or pay attention in the Now.
And with each Now moment, it’s possible to pause and take a conscious breath, observing what’s happening with a sense of curiosity. One moment at a time, you can peacefully choose to be in the power of you heart, to be free of subconscious programming, and to make your own choices.
- Begin quietly, with an inner focus. — What You Can Do and Where to Start: Proactive Empowerment & Human Resilience
- Get perspective. — The World as it Really Is. Making Sense of What Doesn’t Make Sense. The Great Awakening.
- Realize your power and take it back, step-by-step. — Become Aware of Where You’ve Given Your Power Away to Authorities & Systems That Shouldn’t Have It. Decide to Reclaim It.
- Go local. — The Failure of Systems. The Power of People. The Case for Going Local.
The End of a Cycle, and the Beginning of a New One — The One We Choose to Create
Prophecies from the Mayan Calendar, Nostradamus and the Bible indicate that we are now living in ‘the end times’. Not necessarily the end of time, but certainly the end of time as we know it, the end of a cycle. Many of the ancient seers were able to see so far into the future and then no more. We are coming to a blank page, the beginning of a new chapter which we are yet to write. What this new chapter looks like is up to us.”
– A New Chapter by Dana Mrkich
